By morning, I had reached the point where I seriously thought I was about to give birth to my third child. Since that wasn’t exactly part of my plans, I decided it was time to go to the emergency room.

They examined me fairly quickly and, rather amusingly, suggested that I might actually be pregnant.

I laughed.

An ultrasound eventually revealed that it wasn’t a baby after all. It was appendicitis.

A slightly less exciting addition to the family.

They told me I needed surgery and sent me to another hospital.

And from that moment, everything happened surprisingly quickly.

I arrived, was admitted, spoke to the anesthesiologist, changed into my hospital gown, and was put on a bed to be taken to the surgical department.

Or at least that was the plan.

The elevator apparently had other ideas.

We stopped on practically every possible floor. People kept pressing buttons, getting in, getting out, and my hospital bed was enjoying what felt like a guided tour of the entire building.

Eventually, I looked at the person taking me upstairs and said, “Well, we’re not in any hurry, are we?”

That made us laugh, and somehow the tension disappeared.

When we finally arrived in the preoperative room, my surgeon came to see me.

He was a handsome young man, perhaps thirty-five or forty, and looked remarkably like an airline pilot.

Which, given my professional background, immediately made a good impression.

We talked for a moment, and I told him this was my first operation and that I hoped everything would go well.

He looked at me and said, “I know it will.”

I liked that answer.

There was something wonderfully reassuring about a man who didn’t seem to have the slightest doubt about what he was doing.

Then he opened my medical file.

And things became even more interesting.

Apparently, some of the labels or markers on my documents didn’t match the medical history beside them.

He called a nurse over and asked what was going on.

“Oh,” she said, “we mixed up the documents.”

Now, I don’t know what the appropriate reaction is when you’re lying on a hospital bed waiting for surgery and someone announces that your documents have been mixed up.

But I found it hilarious.

I asked, “What diagnosis does the other patient have? Maybe I’d rather keep hers?”

Everyone laughed.

It was exactly like one of those old jokes where someone goes into hospital to have their appendix removed and comes out missing a leg.

Fortunately, they sorted everything out.

And by then, any remaining sense of drama or solemnity had completely disappeared.

I barely had time to feel sorry for myself.

Then they took me into another room.

Everyone was incredibly attentive. Someone carefully removed the covers from my feet, explaining that my feet were getting sweaty.

Of all the things I could have been thinking about at that moment, sweaty feet were probably at the very bottom of the list.

But naturally, I looked down and thought, Damn. I should have painted my toenails.

At least everything else was in order.

I found this genuinely funny. I was about to undergo emergency surgery, and apparently my brain had decided that a pedicure was the most urgent unfinished business in my life.

Then my anesthesiologist arrived.

She explained that I would breathe some oxygen first, and then she would start the anesthesia. She warned me that I might experience some strange sensations in my head.

And she was right.

Interestingly, I was talking to someone on Substack today who told me she hadn’t even managed to notice what anesthesia smelled like before falling asleep.

Well, I did.

And I can report that it was awful.

There was a strange, intoxicating, almost smoky smell, and I could feel something spreading through my head. It was as though my head were inflating from the inside.

I remember telling the anesthesiologist, “My head is about to explode.”

And that, apparently, was the end of our conversation.

The next thing I remember is someone waking me up.

What surprised me most about the whole experience was that I hadn’t been afraid.

Of course, at one point before the operation, the thought crossed my mind that perhaps I wouldn’t wake up. The probability was very small, but still.

And strangely enough, it didn’t frighten me.

If I put aside the obvious thoughts about my children needing me and all the responsibilities waiting at home, the possibility of not waking up didn’t seem frightening at all.

I was simply curious.

It felt almost as though I were observing the whole situation from somewhere outside myself.

And when they woke me up, I remember thinking, Why are you waking me? I was sleeping so well.

There was no pain, no dramatic return to consciousness, no sudden revelation about the meaning of life.

It felt like being woken by an alarm clock in the middle of a particularly good sleep.

My body, however, had a slightly different opinion about the experience.

After the operation, I was shaking badly and had a high temperature.

But eventually, a couple of very handsome young men came to take me to my room.

Which I must say was a rather pleasant development.

They helped me settle in, showed me everything, explained how things worked, and told me to ring whenever I needed anything.

One of them said something I particularly liked:

“It’s better to ring too often than not to ring when you need us.”

I thought that was lovely.

And that was pretty much it.

I had very little pain. Everyone was kind, smiling, attentive, and genuinely lovely.

I lost my appendix, but apparently not my sense of humor.

And look at the benefits! I improved my medical German, probably lost a little weight, and got to enjoy having handsome 25-year-old men bring me coffee in bed.

Honestly, what more could a woman ask for?

All things considered, it was a surprisingly good experience.

Although next time I’d prefer the coffee in bed without having to sacrifice an organ.

Which, considering my previous experiences with job interviews, was almost disappointing.

Nobody asked me what kind of animal I would be if I weren’t human, what my greatest weakness was, or where I saw myself in five years.

I had prepared answers to all three.

A cat, probably. Overthinking. And somewhere with good coffee, fewer responsibilities and a bank account that didn’t require constant supervision.

Instead, they asked normal questions.

About my experience, deadlines, difficult situations, working with people, and what I expected from a new position.

I answered. They listened.

Nobody interrupted me to explain how passionate their company was about excellence.

Nobody referred to the employees as a family.

That was particularly encouraging.

I’d already had one family I hadn’t chosen. I wasn’t looking for another.

The office itself was pleasant, with large windows, a reasonable number of plants and people who appeared to be working rather than performing an elaborate theatrical production about how busy they were.

The woman from HR offered me coffee.

I accepted.

It was terrible.

Which was reassuring.

A company with good salaries, reasonable expectations, pleasant colleagues and excellent coffee would have been suspiciously close to paradise.

And paradise, as far as I understood, wasn’t currently hiring.

They called on Monday.

I was standing in my kitchen, looking at a piece of cheese and trying to decide whether the slightly unusual smell meant it had matured or was preparing to kill me.

My phone rang.

The woman from HR sounded cheerful.

They wanted to offer me the job.

The salary was slightly higher than at my previous company, the conditions were reasonable, and they hoped I could start in three weeks.

I thanked her, asked a couple of practical questions and said I would be happy to accept, subject to reading the contract.

Then we said goodbye.

I stood there for a moment.

“Well,” I told the cheese, “at least one of us has a future.”

I put it back in the fridge.

The cheese, not the future.

Then I made coffee.

I wasn’t overwhelmed with joy, but I was relieved, and I think those are two feelings we sometimes confuse when we’re adults.

Relief doesn’t make you jump around your kitchen shouting that life is wonderful. It just makes something in your chest loosen a little.

I could pay my rent.

I could buy groceries without mentally calculating how many days remained until my next salary.

I could continue being an independent, reasonably functioning adult with an apartment, electricity and the occasional luxury of buying a book I didn’t strictly need.

I hadn’t suddenly fallen in love with office life.

I still didn’t dream of spending the next fifteen years discussing spreadsheets, forwarding emails or attending meetings about meetings.

But I needed to earn a living, and this was a good offer.

There was no reason to reject it simply because I’d recently remembered that I had other interests.

The contract arrived that afternoon.

I read it carefully, asked one question, received a perfectly reasonable answer and signed.

Just like that.

After all the worrying, calculating, imagining disastrous scenarios and wondering how long I could survive without a salary, the solution had arrived in an email attachment.

I sent Anna a message.

I got the job.

She replied almost immediately.

Congratulations! Is it a good one?

Seems like it.

Are you excited?

I considered the question.

I’m excited about being able to afford cheese.

That’s the spirit.

I’ve always been a passionate woman.

She sent me a laughing emoji and asked when I was starting.

Three weeks.

Oh, lovely! You finally have some time for yourself.

I stared at the message.

Some time for myself.

Three weeks.

Twenty-one days, including weekends, which seemed a little unfair because weekends were already mine and I didn’t see why they should suddenly count as part of my unexpected fortune.

Still.

Three weeks.

No office.

No meetings.

No emails beginning with Just a gentle reminder, which, in my experience, was rarely gentle and almost never a reminder.

No one expecting me to be available at nine in the morning.

I could sleep until eight.

Or nine.

I could go to a café on a Tuesday.

I could visit the forest in the middle of the day, when most people were working and the paths would be almost empty.

I could read.

I could write.

I could do absolutely nothing.

I sat at my kitchen table and looked out of the window.

It was just after eleven.

Normally, at eleven on a Monday morning, I would have been at work, answering questions, looking at documents, waiting for someone to reply to an email I’d sent forty minutes earlier.

Now I was sitting at home, drinking coffee.

And nobody cared.

This should have felt wonderful.

Instead, I found myself wondering what I ought to do.

Not what I wanted to do.

What I ought to do.

There was a difference, apparently, and I wasn’t particularly familiar with it.

I decided to make a list.

I’ve always liked lists.

They give the comforting impression that life is under control, even when it’s clearly doing whatever the hell it wants.

I found a notebook and began writing.

Clean the apartment properly.

Sort out the paperwork.

Take old clothes to charity.

Organise the kitchen cupboards.

Book the dentist.

Call Anna.

Finish the book on my bedside table.

Go for longer walks.

Write.

I paused.

Then added:

Buy coffee.

I looked at the list and felt better.

There.

A plan.

Something sensible.

I could spend the first week dealing with practical matters, the second week writing and walking, and the third week preparing for the new job.

Of course, some things would take longer than expected, so perhaps I should start the paperwork today.

And the cupboards.

Actually, the cupboards were in such a state that they probably deserved an entire afternoon.

The bathroom needed attention too.

And if I was going to clean the bathroom, I might as well wash the towels.

Which reminded me that the washing machine filter hadn’t been cleaned in ages.

“Congratulations,” I said aloud. “You’ve managed to turn unemployment into a full-time job without even getting paid.

By Wednesday, I’d accomplished quite a lot.

I’d cleaned the kitchen, sorted through a drawer full of things I apparently believed would become useful after the collapse of civilisation, taken two bags of clothes to charity and finally thrown away a collection of instruction manuals for appliances I no longer owned.

I felt productive.

Responsible.

Almost successful.

I also felt strangely irritated.

Because every evening I went to bed thinking about what I hadn’t done.

There was no manager expecting anything from me, no deadline approaching, no colleague waiting for a report.

And still, I was behaving as though someone would appear on Friday afternoon to evaluate how efficiently I’d spent my unemployment.

I began to wonder whether I’d misunderstood freedom.

Perhaps it wasn’t simply the absence of somebody telling you what to do.

Perhaps it also required you to stop doing their job for them.

On Thursday morning, I woke up at seven thirty.

No alarm.

I lay in bed staring at the ceiling.

I could get up.

I could stay.

There was nothing urgent waiting for me.

Which, after fifteen years, was a surprisingly difficult situation to accept.

I rolled onto my side.

Closed my eyes.

Opened them again.

Thought about the laundry.

“Absolutely not,” I told myself.

I remained in bed for another seven minutes.

Then I got up.

I’d like to say I enjoyed those seven minutes, but I spent most of them wondering whether I was wasting the morning.

Clearly I had some work to do.

Not on the apartment.

On myself.

Unfortunately, I couldn’t find that particular task in any of my notebooks.

Later that day, I went to a café.

Not because I had an appointment, or was meeting someone, or needed a quiet place to answer emails.

I simply wanted coffee.

I chose a table by the window and ordered an espresso.

The waitress brought it, along with a glass of water, and I sat there watching people walk past.

A woman hurried along the pavement while talking into her phone.

A man struggled to open an umbrella that appeared to have developed a personal objection to being useful.

Two teenagers were laughing at something on a screen.

Normally, if I’d been sitting there on a weekday, I would have been checking my phone, thinking about how long I could stay before needing to return to work.

Now there was nothing to return to.

Not yet.

I took another sip.

The espresso was good.

I considered ordering a second.

Then I found myself thinking that perhaps I should go home and do something useful before the afternoon disappeared.

I almost laughed.

There I was, a forty-year-old woman, sitting in a perfectly pleasant café with three weeks of freedom, feeling vaguely guilty because I wasn’t achieving anything.

What exactly was I supposed to achieve?

I’d already found a job.

I’d signed the contract.

I’d paid the rent.

I looked at the people outside again.

And then, because my brain apparently couldn’t be left alone with a simple cup of coffee, I started inventing their lives.

The woman on the phone was probably ending an affair.

The man with the umbrella was on his way to a job interview he didn’t really want.

The teenagers were planning something their parents would discover within approximately four hours.

The delivery driver had once wanted to become a musician.

I knew absolutely nothing about any of them.

Which, of course, had never stopped me before.

I took out my notebook.

Not the one with the lists.

The other one.

I wrote a few sentences about the woman on the phone.

Then another paragraph.

Then I crossed out half of it.

Then I wrote something else.

Nobody interrupted me.

Nobody needed anything.

When I looked up again, almost an hour had passed.

My coffee was cold.

I ordered another.

On the way home, I thought about how often I’d complained that I didn’t have time to write.

And it was true.

For years, I’d been tired after work, distracted by responsibilities, too busy thinking about what needed doing tomorrow to pay much attention to the things I wanted to do today.

But sitting in that café had made me realise something rather irritating.

Even when I had time, I didn’t always allow myself to use it.

I’d become so accustomed to justifying every hour that sitting down to write felt suspiciously like doing nothing.

Unless someone was paying me.

Unless there was a deadline.

Unless it was useful.

I had no trouble spending an entire afternoon fixing somebody else’s problem.

But two hours spent on a story?

That apparently required permission from a committee.

And the committee, unfortunately, lived inside my head.

I got home, put my keys on the table and opened my laptop.

The document was waiting where I’d left it.

I read the last paragraph.

Changed a word.

Changed it back.

Then I checked the time.

There was no reason to.

I could sit there for another hour.

Or two.

I could write something terrible, delete it and start again.

I could write nothing at all.

Nobody would know.

For once, there was no correct way to spend the afternoon.

I sat there thinking about that.

Then I began writing.

Not because I’d finally learned how to enjoy freedom.

Not because I had discovered my purpose.

And certainly not because I’d transformed into a disciplined writer who woke at six in the morning, drank lemon water and produced two thousand brilliant words before breakfast.

I still preferred coffee.

I still hated mornings.

And I still had a list of things I was avoiding.

But I had three weeks before the new job began.

And for the first time in a very long time, I could spend an afternoon doing something simply because I wanted to.

I wrote until it got dark.

Then I realised I hadn’t eaten lunch.

She knew the exact time because she had been asleep.

“Are you busy?” Evelyn asked.

“Yes.”

“Doing what?”

“Sleeping.”

“Oh, good. Then you can help me.”

She opened one eye.

“That’s an interesting conclusion.”

“I need you to come with me somewhere.”

“Where?”

“I’ll explain when you get here.”

“Are you being arrested?”

“Not yet.”

“Evelyn.”

“Bring comfortable shoes.”

And she hung up.

She stared at her phone.

Then at the ceiling.

“I’ve made a terrible mistake befriending this woman.”

An hour later, she was standing outside Evelyn’s apartment building, holding two coffees and feeling slightly resentful about the fact that she’d put on a bra on a Saturday.

Evelyn opened the door wearing a bright green cardigan and red lipstick.

“You’re late.”

“You didn’t tell me what time to come.”

“Precisely. And yet somehow you’ve managed to be late.”

She handed her a coffee.

Evelyn took a sip.

“Oh, that’s much better than the rubbish I make.”

“Good morning to you too.”

“Come in.”

The apartment was on the second floor of an older building.

There were books everywhere.

Not in the carefully arranged way people displayed books when they wanted visitors to think they read.

Evelyn’s books looked used.

Some lay in piles beside the sofa. Others were stacked on shelves in two rows, with the ones at the back apparently abandoned to their fate.

There was a large photograph of a man on the mantelpiece.

He was smiling at the camera with the expression of someone who’d just been told a joke.

Beside it stood a small porcelain dog missing one ear.

The walls were covered in paintings and photographs.

A coat hung over the back of a dining chair.

On the table were three newspapers, a half-finished crossword and a bowl containing exactly one orange.

The apartment looked like somebody actually lived there.

She liked it immediately.

“Nice place.”

“Thank you. I’ve spent eighty-four years collecting rubbish.”

“It’s impressive.”

“Wait until you see the cupboards.”

Evelyn disappeared into the bedroom.

She wandered towards the bookshelf.

Crime novels.

History.

Several biographies.

A cookbook from the nineteen seventies.

And a battered copy of a French novel she recognised but had never managed to finish.

She picked it up.

“Did you read this?”

“Of course,” Evelyn called.

“Did you like it?”

“Not particularly.”

“Then why keep it?”

“Because I paid for it.”

She put it back.

Fair enough.

Evelyn emerged carrying a large cardboard box.

She placed it on the table.

“There.”

She looked at the box.

“What is it?”

“Things.”

“That narrows it down.”

“I need to take them somewhere.”

“Where?”

“To a charity shop.”

She stared at her.

“You woke me up at nine seventeen to take a box to a charity shop?”

“Two boxes, actually.”

“Evelyn.”

“What?”

“Have you considered taxis?”

“Have you considered being useful?”

She laughed.

Evelyn disappeared again.

This time she returned with another box, slightly larger than the first.

“Why today?” she asked.

“Because I’ve been meaning to do it for six months.”

“And suddenly it’s urgent?”

“No. But if I don’t do it today, I’ll spend another six months looking at the bloody boxes.”

She couldn’t argue with that.

She had a cupboard at home containing things she’d intended to sort out in 2019.

They left the apartment carrying a box each.

Evelyn insisted on holding the lighter one.

Which was fair enough, except that she had packed it with books.

“What’s in yours?” she asked.

“Clothes.”

“Why is it so heavy?”

“Because I was very fashionable in the seventies.”

They walked towards the bus stop.

The weather was bright and cold.

Evelyn complained about the wind, the state of the pavement and a cyclist who had passed them without ringing his bell.

“Do you enjoy anything?” she asked.

“Plenty of things.”

“Such as?”

“Complaining.”

They reached the bus stop just as the bus pulled away.

Evelyn watched it disappear.

“Well. That’s rude.”

“We can wait for the next one.”

“Obviously.”

She lowered her box onto the pavement.

Evelyn looked at her.

“You don’t seem yourself.”

She stared at the road.

“That’s unfortunate. I was hoping nobody would notice.”

“Is it a man?”

“No.”

“Money?”

She turned.

“How did you—”

“At your age it’s usually a man or money. Sometimes both, which is particularly exhausting.”

She laughed.

Then stopped.

“I lost my job.”

Evelyn didn’t say anything.

For once.

“Redundancy,” she added. “Restructuring. Exciting opportunities. All the usual nonsense.”

“When?”

“Tuesday.”

“And you didn’t tell me?”

“I haven’t exactly made an announcement.”

“Why not?”

She shrugged.

“I don’t know.”

Evelyn looked at her for a moment.

Then nodded.

“Fair enough.”

That was it.

No lecture.

No declaration that everything happened for a reason.

No suggestion that she should seize the opportunity to reinvent herself.

Just fair enough.

It was unexpectedly comforting.

The next bus arrived twelve minutes later.

Evelyn insisted on sitting near the front.

She lowered herself carefully into the seat, adjusted her cardigan and looked around with the alert expression of a woman who had spent decades observing people and disapproved of most of their decisions.

Across the aisle, a young couple were arguing quietly.

Evelyn leaned towards her.

“Do you think they’re married?”

“Possibly.”

“I give them two years.”

“Evelyn!”

“What?”

“You can’t say that.”

“I didn’t say it to them.”

She laughed.

Then the bus turned sharply and one of the boxes slid across the floor.

“Oh, for God’s sake.”

They spent the next several seconds trying to retrieve a woollen scarf that had escaped through a badly taped corner.

A small boy picked it up and handed it to Evelyn.

“Thank you, darling,” she said.

The boy smiled.

His mother apologised for some reason.

Evelyn assured her it was entirely the bus driver’s fault.

By the time they reached their stop, she was laughing so hard that carrying the box had become difficult.

The charity shop was closed.

A handwritten sign in the window announced that it would reopen on Monday.

They stood outside, looking at it.

Evelyn adjusted her glasses.

“That’s inconvenient.”

She looked at her.

“You checked the opening hours, didn’t you?”

“Of course.”

“When?”

“Last year.”

She stared.

Then started laughing.

Evelyn looked offended.

“Oh, don’t be ridiculous. Shops used to have sensible opening hours.”

“It’s Saturday.”

“Exactly.”

They stood there with the boxes.

A woman pushing a pram gave them a sympathetic glance.

“What now?” she asked.

Evelyn considered the question.

“Lunch?”

“You dragged me across the city carrying approximately half your possessions to a closed shop.”

“Yes.”

“And now you want lunch?”

“Would you prefer to stand here until Monday?”

She looked at the boxes.

Then at Evelyn.

“You’re buying.”

“Naturally. You’ve been made redundant.”

They found a small restaurant two streets away.

The waiter looked at the boxes.

“Are you moving?”

“Emotionally,” she said.

Evelyn laughed.

They ordered soup and bread.

Then Evelyn ordered wine.

“It’s barely midday,” she said.

“I’m eighty-four.”

“Is that an explanation?”

“It’s a privilege.”

She ordered sparkling water.

Somebody had to remain responsible.

Although, considering the circumstances, she wasn’t entirely sure why it had to be her.

They talked about ordinary things.

Food.

The weather.

A television programme Evelyn considered an insult to human intelligence but watched every week.

At one point, Evelyn mentioned her daughter.

“She called yesterday.”

“That sounds nice.”

“She wanted to know whether I was taking my vitamins.”

“Are you?”

“That’s not the point.”

“What’s the point?”

“The point is I survived two husbands, three recessions and raising children without anybody reminding me to swallow a tablet.”

“Two husbands?”

Evelyn looked up.

“Did I say two?”

“Yes.”

“Oh. One husband. The other one was a mistake that fortunately never reached the paperwork stage.”

She laughed.

Evelyn smiled into her wine.

For a moment, she looked very young.

Not because the wrinkles disappeared or her face changed.

But because there was something wonderfully mischievous about the expression.

She wondered what Evelyn had been like at thirty.

Probably trouble.

They finished lunch slowly.

Evelyn insisted on dessert.

Then complained that the cake was too sweet.

She ate all of it.

Eventually, the conversation returned to work.

“Have you found something else?” Evelyn asked.

“Not yet. I’ve had an interview.”

“How was it?”

“Apparently, I’m a wonderful professional.”

“Are you?”

“According to me, yes.”

“Good. At least somebody appreciates you.”

She smiled.

“They’ve invited me back.”

“And?”

“And I’ll go.”

“Do you want the job?”

She looked at her glass.

“I want a salary.”

Evelyn nodded.

“A perfectly respectable ambition.”

“I just don’t know whether I want to spend another fifteen years doing the same thing.”

“Well, don’t.”

She looked up.

“Oh, brilliant. Why didn’t I think of that?”

Evelyn laughed.

“I’m not saying it’s easy. I’m saying you don’t have to decide on the next fifteen years today.”

She considered this.

It was an irritatingly sensible point.

Evelyn buttered another piece of bread.

“Although you probably do have to decide how you’re going to pay the rent.”

“Thank you for bringing us back to reality.”

“Somebody has to.”

They took the boxes back to Evelyn’s apartment.

Evelyn opened the door.

“Put them by the wall.”

She dropped her box.

“Never again.”

“There’s another shop on the other side of town.”

“No.”

“I haven’t asked you anything.”

“No.”

Evelyn laughed.

They stood in the hallway for a moment.

Then Evelyn took off her coat.

“Coffee?”

She looked at the clock.

It was nearly four.

She had meant to spend the afternoon applying for jobs.

Checking emails.

Perhaps preparing for the second interview.

Instead, she’d spent most of the day carrying unwanted clothes around the city with an elderly woman who apparently believed opening hours were a matter of personal opinion.

She thought about going home.

About the laptop waiting on her desk.

The spreadsheet.

The vacancies.

Then she looked at Evelyn.

“Yes,” she said. “Coffee.”

They sat by the window.

Outside, the afternoon was beginning to turn grey.

Evelyn talked about a neighbour who kept feeding pigeons despite repeated complaints from the entire building.

She listened.

Sometimes laughing.

Sometimes asking questions.

Sometimes simply looking around the apartment.

At one point, Evelyn went into the kitchen to find biscuits.

She noticed a photograph on the shelf.

A young woman stood beside a car, wearing a short dress and enormous sunglasses.

Her hair was blowing across her face.

She was laughing at something outside the frame.

She picked up the photograph.

“Evelyn?”

“What?”

“Is this you?”

Evelyn appeared in the doorway.

“Oh, yes.”

“How old were you?”

“Twenty-seven, I think.”

“Where was it taken?”

“Somewhere in Italy.”

“Somewhere?”

“Darling, it was nearly sixty years ago. I’m lucky I remember the country.”

She looked at the photograph again.

“You were beautiful.”

Evelyn shrugged.

“I was twenty-seven.”

“So?”

“So everybody is beautiful at twenty-seven. Most of them are simply too busy worrying about their noses to notice.”

She laughed.

Evelyn came closer.

For a moment, they looked at the picture together.

“Were you happy?” she asked.

Evelyn considered it.

“I suppose so.”

“You suppose?”

“Well, I remember the holiday being wonderful. I also remember crying in a hotel bathroom because a man hadn’t called me.”

“Your husband?”

“No. Someone much more interesting.”

She looked at Evelyn.

Evelyn smiled.

“What? You thought I was born married and elderly?”

“No.”

“Good.”

A pause.

“Although,” Evelyn added, “some days it does feel that way.”

She put the photograph back.

When she finally left, Evelyn stood in the doorway.

“Thank you for helping.”

“We achieved absolutely nothing.”

“Nonsense. We discovered the shop is closed on Saturdays.”

“A tremendous achievement.”

“And we had lunch.”

“That wasn’t the original mission.”

“Plans change.”

She smiled.

Evelyn reached out and briefly squeezed her hand.

“Call me after your interview.”

“I will.”

“And don’t spend all Sunday staring at that computer.”

“I won’t.”

She was almost certain that was a lie.

On the way home, she passed a bookshop.

She stopped outside.

There were new releases in the window.

A novel about a family.

A memoir by somebody famous.

A book promising to teach readers how to change their lives in thirty days.

She looked at that one for a moment.

Then smiled.

“Ambitious.”

She continued walking.

At home, she put her keys on the table, took off her shoes and opened her laptop.

There were three new emails.

None important.

She checked the job listings.

Nothing particularly interesting.

Then she opened her manuscript.

She looked at the page she’d been working on.

For a while, she didn’t write anything.

She was thinking about Evelyn at twenty-seven.

The short dress.

The sunglasses.

The man who hadn’t called.

All those years she’d known nothing about.

She tried to imagine herself at eighty-four.

It was surprisingly difficult.

She could picture an old woman.

A chair.

A window.

Perhaps a shelf full of books.

But she couldn’t quite imagine that woman being her.

She wondered whether Evelyn, at twenty-seven, had pictured the life she’d eventually have.

The husbands.

The children.

The apartment.

The boxes of clothes.

The closed charity shop.

Probably not.

She opened a new page.

Wrote a sentence.

Then another.

At some point, she realised she was smiling.

She was writing about an elderly woman and a younger one who went somewhere together and achieved absolutely nothing.

Except that, somehow, it didn’t feel like nothing.

She wrote until it was dark outside.

And for the first time all week, she hadn’t checked her email in hours.

At 8:15 on Monday morning, she was standing in front of her wardrobe, trying to decide what a woman with fifteen years of professional experience and absolutely no idea what she was doing with her life should wear to a job interview.

A white blouse seemed reasonable.

She put it on.

Too serious.

She tried a blue one.

Too cheerful.

Then a black shirt.

“Wonderful. Now I look like I’m attending my own funeral.”

She went back to the white blouse.

At least it was clean.

The interview was online, which meant she only needed to look employable from the waist up.

She made an espresso and sat at the kitchen table with her laptop.

On the screen was a document she’d prepared over the weekend.

WHY DO YOU WANT TO WORK FOR US?

Because you advertised a job.

WHAT ARE YOUR STRENGTHS?

I can remain polite under circumstances that would justify violence.

WHAT IS YOUR BIGGEST WEAKNESS?

Apparently, I keep answering these questions honestly.

She had written the real answers underneath.

Professional ones.

Answers involving communication, organisational skills and an impressive ability to manage competing priorities.

They sounded perfectly acceptable.

She hated every single one.

At 10:12, she checked the camera.

At 10:17, she adjusted the books behind her.

At 10:21, she removed a coffee cup from the background.

At 10:24, she put it back.

“Let them know I have interests.”

At 10:27, she clicked the meeting link.

There were two interviewers.

The man from the photograph with his arms crossed in front of the glass building introduced himself as Michael.

The woman was called Sophie.

She worked in Human Resources.

Both were pleasant.

This was unfortunate.

She’d been hoping for someone she could dislike.

“Thank you for joining us,” Michael said.

“Thank you for inviting me.”

So far, excellent.

She was doing wonderfully.

They began with the usual questions.

Her previous responsibilities.

The systems she’d worked with.

The projects she’d coordinated.

She answered easily.

For the first twenty minutes, she almost forgot to be nervous.

She knew this world.

Deadlines, reports, missing information, difficult suppliers, customers who changed their minds at the last minute.

She knew how to explain a problem.

She knew how to solve one.

Michael nodded approvingly several times.

Sophie took notes.

Then Michael smiled.

“Tell us a little about yourself.”

Ah.

There it was.

The question.

She had prepared for it.

Of course she had.

She’d written three different answers, read several articles about interview techniques and watched a video featuring a woman who explained that the secret was to present yourself as a compelling professional story.

She’d wanted to ask whether a tragic ending was acceptable.

Instead, she’d taken notes.

Now she smiled.

“I’ve spent the last fifteen years working in operations and project coordination. I’m a very organised person, I enjoy working with people, and I’m especially good at finding solutions when things don’t go according to plan.”

Michael nodded.

Sophie smiled.

It was working.

She continued.

“I like taking responsibility, and I think communication is one of the most important parts of any successful team.”

Another nod.

Very good.

Apparently, she was exactly the sort of person companies wanted.

She wondered where this woman had been hiding all her life.

“What attracted you to our company?” Sophie asked.

She’d researched them.

She knew when the company had been founded, how many offices it had and what it claimed to value.

She’d even found an interview with the CEO, who believed passionately in innovation.

Everyone was passionate about something these days.

“Your international environment,” she said, “and the opportunity to work with a team where I can contribute my experience while continuing to develop professionally.”

Sophie wrote something down.

She was pleased with herself.

Michael leaned forward.

“Where would you like to see yourself in five years?”

She looked at him.

Five years.

In five years, she’d be forty-five.

Perhaps she’d be living somewhere else.

Perhaps she’d finally have written the book.

Perhaps she’d have a dog.

She wasn’t particularly interested in dogs, but who knew what sort of person she’d be at forty-five?

Perhaps she’d become one of those women who owned seven linen dresses and knew how to grow tomatoes.

The possibilities were endless.

“I’d like to grow within a company where I can take on more responsibility and continue developing my skills.”

Michael smiled.

“That’s good to hear.”

She smiled back.

A perfect fit.

They asked about salary.

She gave a figure.

Michael didn’t react.

Sophie asked about her notice period.

She explained.

They discussed remote working, responsibilities and the structure of the department.

Everything sounded reasonable.

Familiar.

Safe.

Towards the end, Michael said, “We are looking for someone who really sees themselves staying with us long term.”

She felt something shift.

Long term.

She knew what that meant.

Five years.

Ten.

Perhaps another fifteen.

Same computer.

Different coffee machine.

Another office kitchen.

She imagined herself sitting at a desk, forty-five, fifty, fifty-five, explaining to a colleague for the seventh time why a document needed to be saved in the correct folder.

She suddenly felt very tired.

“Of course,” she said.

Michael continued.

“We’re very much a family here.”

Oh, no.

She’d heard that before.

At her previous company, they’d also been a family.

A family that had recently decided she was no longer financially convenient.

She smiled.

“That sounds lovely.”

“Do you have any questions for us?” Sophie asked.

She did.

She had several.

Was overtime expected?

How often did people leave?

Was the department properly staffed?

Did Michael always look as though he was about to give a motivational speech?

And why did every company insist on describing itself as a family when what they really wanted was someone who would answer emails at seven in the evening?

She asked about training opportunities.

Michael explained them enthusiastically.

She asked about the team.

Sophie described a supportive working environment.

She nodded.

Everything sounded very nice.

Then, before she could stop herself, she asked:

“Can I ask something slightly different?”

“Of course,” Michael said.

She paused.

“What do people here actually enjoy about their work?”

Michael blinked.

Sophie looked up from her notes.

There was a brief silence.

Not an unpleasant one.

Just unexpected.

“Well,” Michael said, “I think one of the things our employees really appreciate is the opportunity to make an impact.”

She nodded slowly.

“Right.”

He continued talking about teamwork, innovation and shared success.

She listened.

Then smiled.

But she noticed something.

Neither of them had answered the question.

The interview ended at 11:18.

Michael thanked her for her time.

Sophie said they’d be in touch soon.

She closed the laptop.

Sat very still.

Then said:

“Well, that was disgusting.”

Not because she’d done badly.

Quite the opposite.

She’d been charming.

Professional.

Confident.

She’d remembered to smile, asked intelligent questions and given exactly the right answers.

She’d been the sort of woman she’d happily have hired herself.

If she’d been looking for someone to spend another fifteen years organising other people’s priorities.

She went to the kitchen and made coffee.

Then realised she already had one.

She drank it anyway.

Laura called that afternoon.

“How did it go?”

“Beautifully.”

“Really?”

“I’m practically in love with myself.”

“That’s great!”

“Yes. Unfortunately, I don’t recognise the woman they interviewed.”

Laura laughed.

“What do you mean?”

“I told them I was passionate about professional development.”

“Aren’t you?”

“Laura, I’m passionate about having enough money to pay my electricity bill.”

“Well, that’s why you need a job.”

“I know.”

“And if they offer it?”

She looked at the notebook lying on her desk.

The interview questions were still there.

The answers.

All those polished little sentences.

“I’ll probably take it.”

There was a pause.

“Isn’t that what you want?”

She opened her mouth.

Then closed it.

“I don’t know,” she said.

Laura didn’t answer immediately.

“That’s all right,” she said eventually.

She laughed.

“No, it’s really not. I’m forty years old. At some point I should probably know what I want.”

“I’m forty-two. I still don’t know half the time.”

“Yes, but you have a mortgage. That gives you an excuse to be practical.”

“And you have rent.”

“Don’t ruin my argument.”

Laura laughed.

Then asked whether she wanted to meet for coffee later in the week.

She said yes.

That evening, she opened the ridiculous CV she’d written for herself.

She read it again.

Forty years of experience being a person.

Somewhat successful.

She smiled.

Then scrolled down.

Has spent approximately twenty years being afraid to find out whether she can write a book.

She stared at the sentence.

She’d been perfectly comfortable talking to two strangers about her professional ambitions that morning.

She’d told them where she wanted to be in five years.

She’d made it all sound so easy.

But the one thing she actually wanted to find out about herself was something she could barely say aloud.

She closed the CV.

Opened her manuscript.

Read the last paragraph.

Then began writing.

She wrote for almost two hours.

Not particularly well.

At least, she didn’t think so.

But she kept going.

At nine thirty, her phone buzzed.

An email.

From Sophie.

Dear…

She read it.

They’d enjoyed meeting her.

They were impressed with her experience.

They would like to invite her to a second interview.

She looked at the message.

Two weeks ago, she would have been delighted.

Now she was.

Mostly.

She put the phone down and looked at her manuscript.

Then picked it up again.

She replied that she’d be happy to attend.

Sent.

Done.

She opened her document.

The cursor blinked at the end of a sentence.

“Well,” she said to the empty room, “congratulations.”

She wasn’t entirely sure which woman she was talking to.

By Thursday morning, she’d checked her email seventeen times.

By Thursday afternoon, she had developed a personal dislike of the word passionate.

Every company, apparently, was looking for passionate people.

Passionate about logistics.

Passionate about administration.

Passionate about operational excellence.

One company wanted someone passionate about document management.

“Good God,” she said. “What happened to us as a species?”

She had nothing against documents. She had spent fifteen years working with them, and she considered herself reasonably competent.

But passionate?

She wasn’t even passionate about doing the laundry, and at least that produced clean underwear.

She saved the vacancy anyway.

The salary looked decent.

The first thing she’d done after losing her job was make a spreadsheet.

This seemed reasonable.

She listed her monthly expenses, savings, upcoming bills and the number of weeks she could survive before things became genuinely unpleasant.

Then she made another spreadsheet for job applications.

Company.

Position.

Date applied.

Salary, if mentioned.

Status.

Notes.

She considered adding a column called How Much I Hate Myself for Applying, but decided that might become depressing.

Instead, she added Interest Level.

Most jobs received a three out of ten.

One got a six.

She hadn’t applied for that one because it required a special university degree.

She had read the advertisement three times, hoping the degree might disappear.

It didn’t.

“Very stubborn of you.”

She closed the page.

Then opened it again.

Fifteen years of experience.

Excellent references.

She closed the job advertisement.

By Friday, she’d rewritten her CV four times.

The first version made her sound like a woman who had spent fifteen years moving documents from one side of a desk to the other.

The second included the phrase results-driven professional with strong cross-functional communication skills.

She read it aloud.

“Who the fuck is this?”

She deleted it.

Then put it back.

Apparently, this was how professionals spoke about themselves.

Nobody ever wrote:

I am good at my job, even though I occasionally want to throw my computer out of the window.

Or:

I can remain polite while somebody explains a problem they created themselves.

Or:

I know the difference between urgent and actually urgent, which is more than I can say for most people.

She thought those were valuable skills.

LinkedIn disagreed.

LinkedIn wanted measurable achievements, strategic thinking and a compelling professional narrative.

She had a narrative.

Several, in fact.

None of them seemed particularly suitable for employment.

At lunchtime, Laura called.

“How’s the job hunt?”

“Wonderful. I’ve discovered that every company in the country is a dynamic environment.”

Laura laughed.

“Have you applied anywhere?”

“Fourteen places.”

“Already?”

“I’m considering applying to the circus. I have transferable skills.”

“What kind?”

“Working with clowns.”

“Very funny.”

“Thank you. Unfortunately, I don’t think they’ll pay me enough.”

Laura asked whether she’d heard back.

“Two automated confirmations and an email inviting me to subscribe to a company’s newsletter.”

“That’s something.”

“Yes. I’ve always wanted to stay informed about developments in industrial packaging.”

Laura told her not to worry, that it had only been a few days.

“I know.”

“You have plenty of experience.”

“I know.”

“Something will come along.”

She looked at the open job listings on her screen.

“I know,” she said again.

She did not know.

The first rejection arrived at 7:16 the following morning.

Dear Applicant,

Thank you for your interest in joining our team.

She hadn’t even opened the email properly before she knew how it ended.

They had decided to move forward with candidates whose profiles more closely matched their current requirements.

They wished her every success in her future endeavours.

“That’s very kind of you.”

She opened the application tracker.

Changed the status to Rejected.

Then stared at the company name.

She hadn’t particularly wanted the job.

It was further away than she’d liked, the salary hadn’t been listed and the description included the sentence must thrive under pressure, which usually meant somebody in management was terrible at planning.

Yet she was offended.

Deeply.

She wanted to write back.

Dear Team,

Thank you for your rejection. After careful consideration, I have also decided that your company does not meet my requirements.

I wish you every success in finding someone passionate about working under pressure.

She imagined sending it.

She imagined the recruiter reading it aloud in the office.

Then she remembered that the rejection had probably been generated automatically.

“Not even a human being,” she told the kitchen.

The kitchen offered no opinion.

She made an espresso.

That afternoon, an application form asked her to describe herself in three sentences.

She looked at the question.

Three sentences.

She could invent a complete childhood for a stranger sitting opposite her on a train.

She could tell a man in a pizzeria that she lived in Barcelona and describe an apartment she’d never seen.

She could write four pages about a woman waiting for someone in a café.

But apparently she couldn’t explain who she was in three sentences.

She typed:

I am an experienced administrative and operations professional with a strong background in coordination, problem-solving and communication.

It was true.

I am highly organised and able to work independently as well as within a team.

Also true.

For the third sentence, she wrote:

I am looking for an opportunity to contribute my skills to a forward-thinking organisation.

She read all three.

She could feel herself dying of boredom.

“Christ. I’d reject me too.”

She selected the paragraph and deleted it.

Then wrote:

I have spent fifteen years making sure things happen when they’re supposed to, including many things nobody notices unless they go wrong.

She paused.

That was better.

I can organise complicated processes, communicate with difficult people and remain calm when everyone else has decided that panic is a management strategy.

She smiled.

And finally:

I’m looking for a company that values experience, common sense and the occasional well-timed joke.

She read it twice.

She liked it.

Which was usually a bad sign.

Then she copied the sentences into a separate document, saved them, and replaced them with something safer.

She submitted the application.

Afterwards, she felt faintly disappointed in herself.

On Sunday, she gave herself a day off.

This lasted until 9:40 a.m.

She was drinking coffee when she remembered a vacancy she’d saved on Thursday.

She opened her laptop.

An hour later, she was applying for two more jobs.

Then she checked the status of the previous applications.

Nothing.

She refreshed the page.

Still nothing.

“Excellent. Everyone’s dead.”

Her phone buzzed.

A message from Evelyn.

Have you fallen into a hole?

She smiled.

Not yet. Why?

You have been suspiciously quiet.

Busy.

With what?

She looked at the application form.

There was no reason not to tell Evelyn.

But she didn’t feel like explaining.

Boring adult things.

My favourite. Have you committed tax fraud?

Not successfully.

Pity. Lunch this week?

She hesitated.

She could go.

There was no particular reason she couldn’t.

Yet the thought of sitting in a café in the middle of the day, unemployed and spending money, made her uncomfortable.

Maybe later this week?

Fine. I shall try to survive until then.

She put the phone down.

Then picked it up again.

Evelyn?

What?

She stared at the screen.

Nothing. Just checking you’re alive.

A reply came almost immediately.

Unfortunately for several people, yes.

She laughed.

Then went back to her application.

By Monday, she’d begun thinking in bullet points.

While making breakfast, she mentally described herself as efficient in the preparation of nutritious meals.

While cleaning the bathroom, she demonstrated strong attention to detail.

When she dropped a spoon and swore at it, she considered that an example of effective verbal communication in a high-pressure environment.

She wondered whether she was losing her mind.

Probably.

Still, at least she had a spreadsheet.

In the afternoon, she opened a blank document.

She was supposed to be working on her CV again, but instead she typed:

CURRICULUM VITAE

Professional Summary

Forty years of experience being a person.

Somewhat successful.

She laughed.

Then kept going.

Key Skills

Can recognise irritation in an email before reaching the second sentence.

Excellent at finding documents other people insist don’t exist.

Able to sit through meetings without openly questioning the intelligence of everyone present.

Can invent an entire personal history when asked a question she doesn’t want to answer.

Can make a very good espresso.

Can appear to have her life under control for several hours at a time.

She added another line.

Has spent approximately twenty years thinking about writing a book.

She looked at it.

Then changed it.

Has spent approximately twenty years being afraid to find out whether she can write a book.

That was less funny.

She considered deleting it.

Instead, she wrote:

Education

Started studying journalism.

Discovered that wanting something and being good at it might not be the same thing.

Left before finding out for certain.

She stopped typing.

Outside, a car alarm went off.

Somebody shouted something in the street.

She read the last sentence again.

Then she closed the document.

Not because she disliked it.

Because she didn’t.

Tuesday morning brought another rejection.

Wednesday brought nothing.

Thursday brought a message asking whether she’d be interested in a position paying considerably less than her previous salary.

She replied politely that she wouldn’t.

Then spent twenty minutes wondering whether she should have said yes.

By Friday, her application tracker contained twenty-three entries.

Four rejections.

Eighteen unanswered applications.

One job she’d withdrawn from after discovering that flexible working hours meant flexibility was expected exclusively from the employee.

She looked at the spreadsheet.

It had been a productive week.

In a completely unproductive way.

Then a new email arrived.

The subject line read:

Invitation to Interview.

She opened it.

Read it.

Read it again.

A company she’d applied to earlier in the week wanted to speak with her.

An online interview.

Monday at 10:30.

She felt a rush of relief.

Followed immediately by panic.

“Oh, shit.”

She clicked on the company’s website.

Then on the job description.

Then searched for the people who might interview her.

One of them had a photograph in which he was standing with his arms crossed in front of a glass building.

He looked terribly confident.

She disliked him already.

She opened a new document.

Typed:

INTERVIEW PREPARATION

Underneath, she wrote:

Tell us about yourself.

She stared at the sentence.

Then laughed.

“Which version?”

For once, there was nobody to answer.

And for once, she wasn’t entirely sure herself.

This annoyed her.

On ordinary mornings, she could barely persuade herself to get out of bed. Today, apparently, she had developed an extraordinary enthusiasm for punctuality.

“Wonderful,” she muttered. “Just in time to be fired.”

The office was quiet.

She turned on her computer, checked her emails and answered two messages that could easily have waited until tomorrow.

Then she remembered that tomorrow might be a complicated subject.

She made coffee.

It was terrible.

She drank it anyway.

At 8:54, she went to the bathroom.

She checked her reflection, adjusted her shirt and washed her hands.

Then she stood there for another moment, wondering why she’d bothered with the shirt.

It wasn’t as though they’d change their minds because she looked presentable.

“Professional until the bitter end,” she told the mirror.

At 8:59, she walked towards the meeting room.

Her manager was already there.

So was a woman from Human Resources.

The HR woman had a laptop, a glass of water and a small pile of papers arranged neatly in front of her.

She looked about thirty-five.

There was something deeply irritating about being told your future by someone who looked young enough to have been at university when you started working there.

“Good morning,” her manager said.

“Morning.”

“Please, have a seat.”

She sat.

Nobody spoke for a moment.

Then her manager folded his hands.

“I think you’re aware that the company has been going through some significant organisational changes.”

“Yes.”

“As part of this process, we’ve had to review our structure and identify areas where we can operate more efficiently.”

She nodded.

She had heard all of this before.

Not personally, of course. But in meetings, emails and company announcements. The words were familiar enough that she could almost have finished his sentences.

“Unfortunately, your position has been identified as one of the roles affected.”

There it was.

She looked at him.

“Right.”

He continued explaining.

It wasn’t a reflection of her performance.

The decision had been extremely difficult.

The company appreciated her contribution.

She had been a valued member of the team.

She wondered whether anybody had ever attended a meeting like this and been told they were an absolutely dreadful employee whom everyone was delighted to see leave.

Probably.

The HR woman began explaining the next steps.

There would be formal documentation, a notice period, and details concerning her remaining holiday entitlement. They would provide information about support available to employees affected by the restructuring.

She listened.

She understood most of it.

A few words didn’t seem to settle properly in her head.

She asked whether the decision was final.

“Yes,” her manager said.

He looked genuinely uncomfortable.

She almost felt sorry for him.

Almost.

“Right,” she said again.

She was becoming very good at that word.

The HR woman pushed a document towards her.

She looked at it.

Her name was at the top.

She’d seen her name on thousands of documents over the years.

Invoices. Contracts. Reports. Emails.

It looked strangely unfamiliar on this one.

“Do I need to sign this now?”

“No,” the woman said. “You can take time to review everything.”

“Good.”

She picked up the papers.

The meeting lasted eighteen minutes.

Fifteen years of employment.

Eighteen minutes.

She did the calculation while walking back to her desk.

Then decided not to.

Some things weren’t improved by mathematics.

Laura was standing beside the printer when she returned.

She looked up.

One glance was enough.

“Oh, no.”

She nodded.

Laura came over.

“I’m so sorry.”

“Apparently, it’s an exciting opportunity.”

Laura stared at her.

Then, despite herself, laughed.

“Oh, God.”

“Don’t worry. They thanked me for my dedication.”

“That’s nice.”

“Very. I was worried they might forget.”

Laura put a hand on her arm.

“Are you okay?”

“Of course.”

The answer came far too quickly.

She knew it.

Laura knew it.

Neither commented.

“Do you want to go somewhere?” Laura asked. “We could get coffee.”

“I have coffee.”

“Proper coffee.”

She considered that.

“Yes. Actually.”

They went to a café around the corner.

It was busy with people who appeared to be having perfectly ordinary Tuesdays.

A woman was working on a laptop. Two men were discussing a building project. Someone behind them was complaining about the price of breakfast.

She found herself wanting to interrupt.

You think breakfast is expensive? I’ve just lost my salary.

Instead, she ordered an espresso.

Laura sat opposite her.

“Have they told anyone else?”

“I don’t know.”

“Did they explain why you?”

“Restructuring.”

“That’s not an explanation.”

“It is if you say it enough times.”

Laura sighed.

She stared at her coffee.

The ridiculous thing was that she’d spent years complaining about her job.

She complained about the meetings, the emails, the endless spreadsheets and the fact that people who couldn’t operate a printer somehow earned twice as much as she did.

She had occasionally imagined resigning.

In those imaginary scenes, she was always wonderfully calm.

She would walk into her manager’s office, announce she’d decided to pursue her writing, thank everyone politely and leave with an expression of quiet satisfaction.

Instead, she’d been handed a document at nine o’clock on a Tuesday.

“I’m not even sure why I’m upset,” she said.

Laura looked at her.

“Because you’ve just been made redundant?”

“Yes, but I don’t particularly like the job.”

“That doesn’t mean you wanted to lose it.”

She knew that.

It was still irritating to hear somebody say it so clearly.

Laura reached across the table and squeezed her hand.

For a moment, she couldn’t think of anything funny to say.

She looked out of the window.

Then back at Laura.

“I’m going to need to update my CV.”

“Yes.”

“I hate updating my CV.”

“I know.”

“Fifteen years. What am I supposed to write?”

“You’ve done a lot.”

“Mostly forwarded emails and prevented disasters nobody noticed.”

“That’s not true.”

“Fine. Occasionally I created the disasters.”

Laura laughed.

She smiled.

It helped.

A little.

Back at work, she spent the afternoon doing her job.

This seemed absurd.

She answered emails, checked figures and helped a colleague find a document he could have located himself if he’d looked beyond the first page of the shared folder.

At four, her manager came over.

“Please let me know if you need anything.”

She looked at him.

There were several things she needed.

A salary.

A little certainty.

Possibly a different life.

“Thank you,” she said.

He nodded and walked away.

She watched him go.

She didn’t dislike him.

That was almost disappointing.

It would have been easier if she did.

At home, she put the papers on the kitchen table.

Then moved them to the desk.

Then back to the kitchen table.

She didn’t want them beside her writing.

She didn’t particularly want them anywhere.

She made coffee, although it was too late for coffee, and opened her banking app.

She looked at the balance.

Then at her monthly expenses.

Rent. Electricity. Insurance. Food. Transport.

All the ordinary things that didn’t become less expensive simply because your company had discovered a more efficient organisational structure.

She started making a list.

She’d need to check her notice period properly.

Find out what she was entitled to.

Update her CV.

Look for jobs.

There was probably some government office she needed to contact.

She wrote FIND OUT WHICH OFFICE in capital letters.

Then she stared at the list.

It was perfectly manageable.

In theory.

She’d spent fifteen years managing complicated things.

She was good at it.

But somehow it felt different when the complicated thing was her own life.

Her phone rang.

Evelyn.

She looked at the name.

For a moment, she considered not answering.

Then she picked up.

“Hello?”

“Well,” Evelyn said, “are you alive?”

“Apparently.”

“Good. I was worried. You haven’t contacted me in several days.”

“It’s Tuesday.”

“And?”

“We saw each other on Friday.”

“Exactly. Practically a week.”

She smiled.

“What can I do for you?”

“Nothing. I wanted to ask whether you’re free for lunch sometime.”

“Probably.”

“Wonderful. You sound miserable.”

“Thank you.”

“Have you been drinking that awful office coffee again?”

“Among other things.”

There was a pause.

“Something happened?” Evelyn asked.

She looked at the papers on the table.

She could tell her.

It wouldn’t be difficult.

Three words.

I lost my job.

Instead, she said, “Just a long day.”

“Ah.”

Evelyn didn’t sound entirely convinced.

But she didn’t press.

“Well, get some sleep. Everything looks worse when you’re tired.”

“Does it?”

“Usually. Although some things look exactly as dreadful the next morning.”

She laughed.

“That’s reassuring.”

“I do my best.”

They agreed to talk later.

After hanging up, she sat at the table for a while.

She hadn’t lied, exactly.

It had been a long day.

She looked at the paperwork again.

Then opened her laptop.

Her writing document appeared on the screen.

She’d left it open the previous evening.

There was a woman in the story standing outside a small house, wondering whether to knock.

She read the paragraph.

It was rather good.

She wanted to continue.

Instead, she opened another tab.

Jobs in my area.

A list appeared.

Project coordinator.

Administrative manager.

Operations specialist.

Office administrator.

She scrolled.

Different companies.

Different salaries.

The same words.

She clicked on one.

Read the description.

Closed it.

Opened another.

She knew she could do these jobs.

That wasn’t the problem.

She stared at the screen.

Then quietly said:

“Do I really have to do this for another fifteen years?”

There was nobody there to answer.

She sat for a long time.

Eventually, she closed the job listings and opened her CV.

She typed her name at the top.

Then her contact details.

Under Professional Experience, she wrote the name of the company.

Fifteen years.

She stopped.

“Jesus Christ.”

She looked at the empty space below.

Then began listing everything she’d done.

It was surprisingly difficult to make a life sound impressive in bullet points.

By midnight, she’d written half a CV, drunk two coffees and developed a headache.

She saved the document.

Turned off the computer.

Went to bed.

For a while, she lay awake.

She thought about the office.

Laura.

The people she’d worked with.

The familiar desk.

She thought about her rent.

Her savings.

The next few months.

And then, quite unexpectedly, she thought about the house in the forest.

The dirty windows.

The crooked porch.

The broken chair.

She wondered whether it was still standing.

Of course it was.

She’d seen it only recently.

She turned onto her side.

“Lucky bastard,” she murmured.

The house, at least, didn’t have to update its CV.

Not an especially alarming email. In fact, it was almost aggressively cheerful.

Dear Team,

As part of our ongoing commitment to building a stronger, more efficient organisation, we are pleased to announce a series of exciting changes.

She read it twice.

“Oh, fuck.”

She had been working in offices long enough to understand that exciting changes rarely involved anything exciting for the people expected to survive them.

There had been exciting changes before.

One had involved replacing the coffee machine with something that produced a brown liquid of uncertain origin.

Another had introduced a new software system that required employees to perform six additional steps to do something they had previously managed in two.

The company had called that one simplifying our workflow.

She’d once suggested that somebody in management should buy a dictionary.

The suggestion had not been particularly well received.

She forwarded the email to Laura.

How excited are we supposed to be? On a scale of one to unemployment?

Laura replied:

I’m already updating my CV.

Don’t be dramatic.

You’re the one who mentioned unemployment.

I was being professionally enthusiastic.

At ten, there was a meeting.

The meeting had been scheduled for thirty minutes and lasted fifty-seven.

A man from headquarters appeared on the screen. She had seen him before, usually in emails announcing the company’s record achievements and expressing gratitude for everybody’s continued dedication.

His name was Thomas.

He was wearing a navy suit and smiling in a way that suggested he was either about to announce a promotion or sell them life insurance.

“First of all,” he began, “I want to thank every single one of you for your hard work.”

She looked at Laura, who was sitting across the conference table.

Laura raised one eyebrow.

“Over the past year, we’ve faced significant challenges. But challenges also create opportunities.”

She opened her notebook.

Wrote CHALLENGES = OPPORTUNITIES.

Then drew a small coffin beside it.

Laura saw it and pressed her lips together.

Thomas continued talking about operational efficiency, strategic priorities and the importance of remaining agile.

She wondered whether anybody in the history of employment had ever felt reassured by the word agile.

“We want to be completely transparent throughout this process,” he said.

Ah.

There it was.

Process.

She underlined the word in her notebook.

Someone asked whether there would be redundancies.

Thomas stopped smiling quite so enthusiastically.

“At this stage, we’re reviewing several scenarios.”

She wrote:

YES.

Another colleague asked when they would know more.

“We’ll communicate any relevant developments in due course.”

She wrote:

WHEN WE FEEL LIKE IT.

By the end of the meeting, they’d been thanked six times and told almost nothing.

“Very informative,” Laura said as they walked back towards their desks.

“I feel stronger already.”

“Do you think they’ll actually let people go?”

“Yes.”

Laura looked at her.

“You’re very calm.”

“I’m not calm. I’m hungry.”

It was eleven.

She had another hour before lunch.

This seemed unnecessarily cruel.

By Wednesday, everybody had become an expert in corporate restructuring.

Martin from finance knew someone who knew someone in headquarters.

A woman from customer service had heard that the company was closing an entire department.

Someone else insisted they were moving everything abroad.

Nobody knew anything.

This did not stop anybody from talking.

The kitchen had become the company’s unofficial intelligence agency.

People who had barely greeted one another for years were suddenly whispering over the microwave.

She found the situation fascinating.

And unpleasant.

At lunch, Laura sat opposite her with a salad she’d bought downstairs.

“They’ve cancelled next month’s training.”

“Perhaps they’ve finally realised we don’t need another course on effective communication.”

“They’ve also frozen recruitment.”

“Maybe they’re giving us time to recover from the training.”

Laura put down her fork.

“Do you ever take anything seriously?”

“Of course.”

“When?”

“Usually around three in the morning.”

Laura smiled, but only briefly.

“I’ve got a mortgage.”

“I know.”

“And my daughter’s starting university next year.”

“I know that too.”

Laura pushed a tomato around her plate.

“I really can’t afford to lose this job.”

She looked at her friend.

For once, no joke came immediately.

“I hope you won’t,” she said.

Laura nodded.

Then, as if embarrassed by having admitted she was frightened, she changed the subject.

“By the way, have you written anything else?”

“An email to accounting. Absolutely devastating.”

“I’m serious.”

“So am I. They owe me forty-three euros.”

Laura laughed.

She was pleased to hear it.

She knew the company could manage perfectly well without her.

She had never believed otherwise.

People liked to talk about being indispensable, but she’d seen enough people retire, resign, disappear on maternity leave or go off sick to know how quickly an organisation adapted.

There might be confusion for a week.

Someone would complain about a missing file.

A manager would say they had no idea how she used to do something.

Then another person would figure it out.

Three months later, her name would occasionally come up in a conversation beginning with Do you remember when…

A year later, perhaps not even that.

She wasn’t offended by the thought.

It was how companies worked.

She simply preferred not to be the person used to demonstrate it.

Fifteen years was a long time to spend somewhere.

She knew which printer jammed when you looked at it, which colleague took criticism personally, and which suppliers needed three reminders before answering an email.

She knew how to solve problems before they became problems.

She knew when a meeting could have been an email.

Most of them.

And she knew that none of this necessarily made her worth keeping.

Still, every time she heard footsteps approaching her desk, she looked up.

On Thursday, the director walked through the office with two people nobody recognised.

Both wore suits.

One carried a folder.

By lunchtime, somebody had decided they were consultants.

By two, they were apparently specialists in redundancies.

By four, according to the woman from customer service, one of them had personally closed three companies.

“Impressive career,” she said.

Nobody laughed.

She went back to work.

There were invoices to approve and a report due on Friday.

Apparently, the possibility of unemployment did not excuse anybody from meeting deadlines.

She found this particularly irritating.

At five thirty, she shut down her computer.

Then turned it on again because she’d forgotten to send the report.

“Fourteen years and eleven months,” she muttered. “And they still haven’t taught me how to leave.”

At home, she did something she hadn’t done for years.

She looked for her employment contract.

It wasn’t where she expected.

She checked the drawer beneath her desk, then the cupboard where she kept passports, insurance documents and several instruction manuals for appliances she no longer owned.

Eventually, she found it in a folder marked IMPORTANT.

The folder also contained a receipt for shoes bought eight years earlier and a leaflet about dental insurance.

“Excellent filing system.”

She made coffee and sat down at the table.

There it was.

Her name. Her signature. The date she had started working.

She had been so pleased to get the job.

She remembered buying a new blouse for her first day and arriving twenty minutes early because she was terrified of being late.

The office had looked enormous.

Everybody seemed to know things she didn’t.

A woman had shown her where the kitchen was.

She remembered thinking she wouldn’t stay very long.

A year or two, perhaps.

Until she figured out what she really wanted to do.

She looked at the date again.

Fifteen years.

“Well done,” she told herself. “Very decisive.”

She found the paragraph about termination.

Read it.

Read it again.

Then opened her laptop and searched for an explanation of notice periods.

Twenty minutes later, she had seven browser tabs open and a growing suspicion that she’d misunderstood something important.

She considered asking Laura.

Then decided against it.

Laura had enough to worry about.

She closed the tabs and looked at her contract again.

It was a strange thing, she thought, to spend so many years in a place you regularly dreamed of leaving and then feel frightened by the possibility that somebody might actually let you go.

She got up and washed the dishes.

There were only two cups in the sink.

An unusually successful week.

On Friday, nothing happened.

Nobody called her into an office.

No announcement appeared in her inbox.

There were meetings, phone calls, a printer that stopped working and a colleague who sent her an urgent request at 4:52 p.m.

By the time she got home, she was almost embarrassed by how much energy she’d spent worrying.

Perhaps nothing would happen.

Perhaps management would find another way to reduce costs.

Perhaps they’d cancel the Christmas party.

She could live with that.

She heated some leftover pasta and ate it standing in the kitchen.

Then she opened her writing document.

There was a woman in the story who kept promising herself she’d do something important when she had more time.

She looked at the sentence.

“Subtle,” she said.

She changed it.

Then changed it back.

She wrote for forty minutes, which wasn’t bad for a Friday evening.

When she finally closed the laptop, she felt almost normal.

On Monday morning, her inbox contained an invitation.

Organisational Update.

Tuesday.

9:00 a.m.

Attendees: her manager, a representative from Human Resources, and herself.

She clicked on the invitation.

There was no agenda.

No attachment.

No explanation.

She read the subject line again.

Then checked the list of attendees, as though one of the names might have changed.

It hadn’t.

She sat very still.

Across the office, somebody was laughing at something on a phone.

The printer started making an unpleasant grinding noise.

A colleague asked whether anyone knew where the spare paper was kept.

Life, apparently, was continuing without consulting her.

She opened the calendar invitation once more.

Organisational Update.

“Well,” she said quietly.

She clicked Accept.

Then opened the report she’d been working on.

The numbers were still there.

The formulas still worked.

For the rest of the morning, she kept working.

At 12:43, she went to the kitchen, made herself coffee and stood looking out of the window.

She was not surprised.

That was the annoying part.

She’d understood perfectly well what was happening.

She’d simply hoped it was happening to somebody else.

We remember beginnings remarkably well. The first kiss, the first day at school, the first time someone held our hand, the first time we fell in love. Sometimes we even remember what we were wearing, what the weather was like, what song was playing somewhere in the background.

But endings are different. Most of them don’t announce themselves, and we walk straight through them thinking we’re in the middle of something.

We say goodbye, close the door, go home, make dinner, answer emails and continue with our lives, completely unaware that something has just happened for the very last time.

I’ve been trying to remember some of mine.

The last time I saw my grandmother was in August.

I visited her, but I didn’t stay long, and I remember feeling guilty about that even then. She was talking to her friend about Covid, about the difficulties of travelling and visiting each other, about how complicated everything had become. It was an ordinary conversation, the kind almost everyone was having at the time, and I don’t remember anything particularly remarkable about that afternoon.

In November, they were both gone.

My grandmother and her friend.

I have returned to that afternoon so many times in my head, not because I remember anything important being said, but because I remember leaving and feeling that I hadn’t stayed long enough.

People will tell you that you couldn’t have known, and of course they’re right. I know that too. But knowing something intellectually doesn’t necessarily change the way it feels.

I wish I’d stayed.

Not to have some meaningful conversation about life, not to ask questions I hadn’t thought of asking before, not to collect wisdom that I could carry with me afterwards. I would have been perfectly happy to sit there listening to them talk about Covid for another hour, perhaps drinking coffee, perhaps occasionally looking at the clock and thinking about everything else I needed to do.

What I wouldn’t give now for one more boring afternoon.

I don’t remember the last time I saw my father.

I don’t remember where we were, what we said to each other, whether we hugged or whether I left in a hurry. I’ve tried to find that moment in my memory, but it isn’t there, or at least not in any form I can recognise.

And that bothers me sometimes, because memory has preserved so many completely useless details from my life. I remember dresses I wore twenty years ago, conversations with strangers, the smell of certain places, ridiculous things people said when I was a child, and yet something I would genuinely like to remember has disappeared.

I don’t even know whether either of us understood that it would be the last time.

Perhaps it was nothing more than an ordinary goodbye, and that is why I can’t remember it.

Not every important moment feels important when it happens.

Some of them become important only because there was never another one.

And it isn’t always death that makes a meeting the last.

I remember my first boyfriend.

I was sixteen, and he was leaving for somewhere. I don’t even remember all the circumstances now, but I remember that my girlfriends and I were going to a disco.

I remember his face as I left. He looked surprised, and a little hurt, as though he’d expected me to stay longer or at least understand that leaving mattered to him.

I didn’t.

There was music waiting, my friends were already going, and I had absolutely no intention of spending the evening standing around being emotional.

What can you do with a sixteen-year-old girl who wants to go dancing?

I don’t remember what I wore that evening or whether the disco was any good. I don’t remember the music, the people we met or what time I came home, but I remember the look on his face.

It’s strange how memory makes these decisions for us.

I haven’t spent the last twenty-four years regretting that I went dancing, and I don’t think the girl I was deserves a lecture from the woman I’ve become. She was sixteen, impatient, excited about life and probably a little careless with other people’s feelings, as sixteen-year-olds sometimes are.

But I wish she had known enough to stop for another minute.

Then again, perhaps if she had, I wouldn’t remember the moment at all.

There was also a school friend I lost without either of us really deciding to end the friendship.

About two years after her wedding, she invited me over, and we drank two bottles of champagne together. Under normal circumstances that should have guaranteed a fairly successful evening, especially considering how many things we had to remember from our school years.

But somewhere during those two bottles, I began to understand that we were no longer the girls who had once known each other so well.

Her marriage, from what I could see, hadn’t done her much good. Life had changed her, and I suppose it had changed me too, although it’s always easier to recognise what has happened to somebody else.

We still had our memories, our old jokes, the people we’d known and all those stories that belonged to a time when we were growing up alongside each other. But the present had become unfamiliar territory, and the more we talked, the more obvious it was that we no longer had very much in common.

It wasn’t an argument. Nobody cried, nobody accused anybody of anything, and I don’t remember either of us saying something particularly cruel.

We simply sat together, drinking champagne, while the distance between us became impossible to ignore.

I think this is how many friendships end, although we tend to imagine endings as more dramatic than they usually are.

You say you’ll see each other again, perhaps even believe it, and then years pass.

Eventually, you realise that the last meeting has already happened.

I wonder how many people from my life have a similar story about me.

Perhaps someone remembers a conversation I have completely forgotten, or an afternoon I considered unimportant. Perhaps somebody still feels hurt by something I said when I was too young, too distracted or simply too stupid to realise what it meant to them.

There must be people who remember me fondly, others who remember me rather less generously, and probably quite a few who don’t remember me at all.

That’s fair enough.

I don’t remember everyone either.

But I find it fascinating that we exist in so many different versions of other people’s lives, often without knowing which version they have kept.

My first boyfriend might remember an entirely different ending to our story. My school friend might have gone home from that evening convinced we’d had a wonderful time. For all I know, she remembers the champagne and the laughter, while I remember the distance.

Neither memory necessarily has to be false.

We don’t experience the same moments in the same way, even when we’re sitting at the same table.

And when someone is no longer here to tell their side, those differences become permanent.

I’ve sometimes wondered what people would remember about me if I weren’t here tomorrow.

It’s an odd exercise, because the practical side of it is almost comical.

My phone would continue receiving messages, my email inbox would fill up, subscriptions would renew, and somewhere an automated system would probably send me an urgent reminder that my password was about to expire.

At work, somebody would take over my responsibilities. There might be a little confusion, a few missing documents, perhaps someone asking how I used to do things, but eventually another person would work it out.

What I find more interesting is how easily we allow work to convince us that everything depends on us, even when we know perfectly well it doesn’t.

We answer messages at ridiculous hours, carry other people’s problems into our evenings, postpone things we actually want to do and sometimes give our best energy to a company before returning home with whatever is left.

I’ve done it myself, and I suspect part of the reason is that being needed can feel rather satisfying. If we’re indispensable, all that sacrifice must mean something.

And then I think about my children, who certainly have no intention of allowing me to become dispensable any time soon.

Some days I hear the word Mummy so often that I begin to suspect it has replaced my actual name.

Mummy, where are my shoes? Mummy, I’m hungry. Mummy, can you help me? Mummy, look! Mummy, why? And why? And why again?

Yet when I imagine what my children might remember about me one day, I don’t immediately think of birthdays, holidays or the things I spend so much time organising for them.

I think of the ridiculous little details.

The way I say good morning, the meals I make, the things I repeat so often that they probably roll their eyes before I’ve finished the sentence.

Perhaps years from now, something entirely ordinary will remind them of me. A smell in a kitchen, a piece of music, a joke they suddenly understand differently.

I know how that happens because I still remember the smell of my grandmother’s house.

I remember the rooms, the bedding, the air, and sometimes that memory feels more real than any photograph I have of her.

It’s extraordinary, really, what remains of a person.

We take photographs at weddings and birthdays, make videos of special occasions, carefully preserve the moments we think will matter, and then spend the rest of our lives being ambushed by the smell of bread.

I wonder what will remain of me in other people’s memories.

Perhaps not the things I worked hardest to achieve, or the things I considered important at the time.

Maybe somebody will remember me because I once made them laugh when they were having an awful day.

Maybe someone will remember a conversation that I forgot almost immediately.

And perhaps somebody will remember me for a completely stupid argument in which I was convinced I was right.

I should probably apologise in advance.

I think about my readers, too, and how peculiar it is that people I’ve never met can know something about me that even some of the people closest to me don’t.

I sit down with my coffee, usually with no particularly grand intention, and write about something that’s been bothering me, amusing me or refusing to leave my head.

Then somebody on the other side of the world reads it.

Perhaps they’re sitting in their kitchen, perhaps they’re on a train or lying awake when they should be sleeping. I don’t know what their life looks like, what they’re worried about or why a particular sentence speaks to them.

But sometimes they write back, and suddenly two people who might never have crossed paths are having a conversation about something deeply personal.

I love that.

I love that words can travel into rooms I’ll never enter and become part of conversations I’ll never hear.

And I wonder whether, long after we’re gone, fragments of us continue doing exactly that.

Not necessarily through books or anything grand. Sometimes through a recipe, a phrase, a habit, a story someone tells at dinner.

We’re all leaving bits of ourselves everywhere, usually without realising it.

Of course, not all those bits are beautiful.

That’s something we don’t often mention when we talk about being remembered.

We leave behind disappointments as well as tenderness, unfinished arguments as well as funny stories, and there will almost certainly be people who remember occasions when we failed them.

I don’t imagine that my children will remember me as endlessly patient, because that would require a rather spectacular failure of memory.

I hope they’ll remember the good things, but I also hope they’ll be allowed to laugh about the times I was unreasonable, impatient or completely wrong.

I’d hate to become a saint simply because I wasn’t around to object.

And yet, when I think about all the different ways we remain in people’s lives, I keep coming back to what disappears with us.

The memories nobody else shares.

The things we never said.

The questions we never asked.

The places we meant to visit and the conversations we kept postponing because there would always be another opportunity.

I’m particularly talented at postponing things.

I’ll write more when life becomes quieter. I’ll travel when there’s enough money. I’ll rest when everything is finished. I’ll spend more time with people I love when I have fewer responsibilities.

One day, one day, one day.

It’s remarkable how much living a person can schedule for a future that hasn’t agreed to exist.

And I know perfectly well that life isn’t as simple as deciding to do everything immediately.

I don’t believe everyone should quit their job tomorrow, buy a plane ticket and announce that they’ve discovered the meaning of life.

But there’s a difference between being responsible and endlessly postponing yourself, and I sometimes wonder how often I’ve confused the two.

Perhaps that’s why those last meetings stay with me.

Not because I believe we should approach every goodbye as though it might be permanent. That would make ordinary life almost unbearable.

Imagine trying to leave the house to buy milk while everyone insists on having a meaningful farewell.

We’d never get anywhere.

And sometimes a goodbye really is just a goodbye.

But I think about the hours I’ve spent doing things that didn’t matter particularly much, and the times I’ve hurried away from people because something else seemed more urgent.

I think about the afternoon with my grandmother, and I wonder what exactly was waiting for me that couldn’t have waited a little longer.

I don’t remember.

Whatever it was has disappeared from my memory completely.

But I remember leaving.

That’s a difficult thing to admit, because I don’t want to turn an ordinary visit into a moral lesson, especially one I’m now using against myself.

I had a life. Things to do. Responsibilities. Reasons for not staying longer.

I was not supposed to know what November would bring.

Still, the feeling remains.

Sometimes we simply have to live with the fact that we wish we’d done something differently.

I wish I’d stayed longer with my grandmother.

I wish I could remember my last conversation with my father.

I wish I’d understood the look on that boy’s face a little better when I was sixteen, although I suspect I’d still have gone dancing.

And I sometimes wonder what happened to the girl who drank champagne with me all those years ago, whether she remembers that evening, whether she’s happy now, whether she would even recognise the woman I’ve become.

I don’t know.

There are so many people whose stories we once knew intimately and whose lives now continue somewhere beyond our knowledge.

Some are gone forever.

Others are simply living without us, just as we’re living without them.

I find both possibilities strangely moving.

If I weren’t here tomorrow, people would eventually continue with their lives.

They would laugh again, fall in love, complain about the weather, make plans and forget things.

We can miss someone terribly and still enjoy our breakfast.

We can carry grief for years and spend most of an ordinary Tuesday thinking about something else.

We can love people who are no longer here without making our own lives into monuments to their absence.

And maybe that is one of the things I find most extraordinary about being alive: how much we carry without necessarily showing it, how many people can be present in our thoughts while the rest of the world sees us buying groceries or waiting for a bus.

But I would like to stop assuming that the people I love will always be available next week, next month, next summer.

I still remember that afternoon.

I remember how short the visit felt.

And if I could go back, I wouldn’t need to ask my grandmother anything extraordinary or tell her something I’d never said before.

I’d just make myself comfortable.

Listen to the conversation.

And stay a little longer.

She sat down again.

The man from the pizzeria looked slightly confused.

Our heroine was considering several options, none particularly attractive.

She could pretend not to recognise him.

Too late.

She could explain that there had been a misunderstanding.

Technically possible.

Or she could simply walk away.

Unfortunately, she had already paid for lunch, and walking away from a perfectly pleasant conversation seemed a little dramatic.

“Hello,” she said.

The man smiled.

“I thought you were in Barcelona.”

“Yes,” she said.

A terrible beginning.

Evelyn looked at her.

“Barcelona?”

“It’s a long story.”

“Well, good,” Evelyn said. “I hate short ones.”

The man laughed.

She did not.

Not because she didn’t appreciate the joke, but because she was busy trying to remember exactly what she had told him.

Something about an apartment.

A balcony.

Books.

Oh, God. The neighbour.

Elena.

There had definitely been an Elena.

“How long are you back for?” he asked.

She opened her mouth.

“She’s only here for a few days,” Evelyn said.

Both of them turned towards her.

Evelyn looked perfectly relaxed.

Our heroine stared.

What the fuck?

“Oh,” the man said. “Well, that’s lucky timing.”

“Very lucky,” Evelyn agreed.

She smiled at him.

“Would you like to join us?”

“No!” our heroine said.

A little too quickly.

Evelyn raised an eyebrow.

“I mean, he might be busy.”

“I’ve got a few minutes,” he said.

“Wonderful.”

Evelyn pointed to the empty chair.

“Sit down.”

He sat.

Of course he did.

People were remarkably obedient around Evelyn.

“So,” Evelyn said, folding her hands on the table, “how do you two know each other?”

“We met at a pizzeria,” he explained.

“How romantic.”

“It wasn’t romantic,” she said.

“He borrowed some oregano,” the man added.

Evelyn looked at him.

“An unusual opening move.”

“I also asked for chilli oil.”

“Oh, well. Clearly you were serious.”

He laughed.

She took a sip of cold coffee.

She wished she’d ordered something stronger.

“I’m afraid we’ve only met once,” he said. “And I don’t think I even introduced myself properly.”

There was a pause.

“Daniel,” he said.

She told him her name.

Evelyn looked between them.

“So you’ve already discussed international relocation and you hadn’t exchanged names?”

“It was a very efficient conversation,” she said.

Daniel laughed.

She was beginning to remember why she’d liked him.

This was inconvenient.

A waiter appeared.

Daniel ordered coffee.

Evelyn ordered another slice of apple cake.

“You’ve already had cake,” she whispered.

“Yes,” Evelyn said. “And I enjoyed it enormously.”

Daniel smiled.

“So, how’s Barcelona?”

There it was again.

She could practically hear the word approaching every time he opened his mouth.

“Lovely,” she said.

“Still living in the same apartment?”

Before she could answer, Evelyn leaned forward.

“Oh, she’s terribly private about that apartment.”

She turned towards Evelyn.

“I am?”

“Very.”

Daniel looked amused.

“Really?”

“Absolutely. Won’t even tell me what colour the curtains are.”

She stared at the older woman.

Evelyn smiled innocently.

“I don’t have curtains,” she said.

A stupid thing to say.

She knew it immediately.

“Of course,” Evelyn said. “I keep forgetting.”

Daniel laughed.

“Is there a story behind this?”

“Not a particularly interesting one,” she said.

“Everything has a story,” Evelyn replied.

“Not everything needs to be told.”

“Now that’s where we disagree.”

Somehow, they survived the next fifteen minutes.

Daniel talked about his work, which turned out to involve restoring old buildings.

She nearly laughed.

Of course it did.

Of all the professions in the world.

Evelyn was immediately interested.

“Restoring buildings?”

“Mostly residential properties.”

“Old houses?”

“Sometimes.”

“Falling-apart houses in forests?”

He laughed.

“Occasionally, I suppose.”

She kicked Evelyn gently under the table.

Evelyn didn’t react.

“Why do you ask?” Daniel said.

“Oh, no reason.”

There was a very long pause.

Our heroine decided she would never introduce Evelyn to another human being again.

Daniel checked his watch.

“I really should go.”

“Probably for the best,” she said.

He laughed.

“Still not interested in exchanging numbers?”

Evelyn looked up from her cake.

“Oh, for heaven’s sake.”

“Evelyn.”

“What?”

“Nothing.”

Daniel smiled.

“No pressure. I just thought I’d ask.”

She looked at him.

She liked him.

That was still true.

And she could imagine enjoying another evening talking to him.

Unfortunately, she could also imagine the administrative difficulties involved in maintaining a life in Barcelona.

“Perhaps another time,” she said.

He nodded.

“Fair enough.”

Then he smiled.

“Well, it was lovely seeing you again.”

“You too.”

“And enjoy the rest of your visit.”

“Thank you.”

He turned to Evelyn.

“Nice meeting you.”

“Likewise. Do come back if you need more oregano.”

He laughed and walked away.

They watched him disappear into the crowd.

For a moment, neither woman spoke.

Then Evelyn put down her fork.

“Well.”

She closed her eyes.

“Please don’t.”

“Barcelona?”

“Evelyn.”

“The apartment?”

“Please.”

“The curtains?”

She started laughing.

She couldn’t help it.

Evelyn laughed too, so hard that she had to take off her glasses.

“Oh, darling,” she said. “What on earth have you been up to?”

“Nothing.”

“Of course.”

“Really.”

“Then you’re the most suspiciously innocent woman I’ve met in years.”

They stayed another half hour.

Evelyn didn’t demand an explanation.

That was almost worse.

She simply continued eating her cake, occasionally looking across the table with an expression that suggested she’d discovered a particularly entertaining television programme.

Eventually, our heroine sighed.

“I don’t live in Barcelona.”

“I gathered.”

“I’ve been there.”

“I should hope so.”

“And I liked it.”

“Wonderful.”

She looked at Evelyn.

“Are you going to ask me why I told him I lived there?”

“Would you tell me?”

She considered that.

“Probably not.”

“Then no.”

She laughed.

Evelyn finished her coffee.

“People tell all sorts of stories about themselves,” she said. “Especially to strangers.”

“Do they?”

“Good heavens, yes.”

She paused.

“Once, on a train, I told a man I was a retired opera singer.”

She stared at her.

“Were you?”

“Absolutely not.”

“Why?”

“He’d been explaining opera to me for twenty minutes. I wanted to see how long it would take him to notice.”

“And?”

“He never did.”

She laughed.

“What did you do?”

“I began inventing productions I’d performed in.”

“Evelyn!”

“What? He was enjoying himself.”

“And you?”

“Immensely.”

They both laughed.

Outside the café, the afternoon had turned cooler.

They walked slowly towards the square.

Evelyn was telling her about an opera she’d once attended in Vienna, although it was becoming increasingly difficult to establish whether she’d actually been to Vienna.

She didn’t ask.

At the crossing, Evelyn stopped.

“You know,” she said, “I rather liked him.”

“Daniel?”

“Was that his name?”

“Yes.”

“Good. One of us was paying attention.”

She laughed.

“He seemed nice,” Evelyn continued.

“He is.”

“And interested.”

“Yes.”

“Are you?”

She looked away.

“I don’t know.”

Evelyn nodded.

“Perfectly respectable answer.”

Then, after a moment, she added:

“Though if you do see him again, you may want to move back from Barcelona first.”

She laughed so loudly that two people turned around.

Evelyn looked delighted.

That evening, she returned home and took off her shoes.

She was still smiling.

It had been a strange afternoon.

Not unpleasant.

Just strange.

She had gone out expecting lunch with an elderly woman and somehow ended up discussing a Spanish apartment that didn’t exist with a man she hadn’t expected to see again.

And Evelyn had helped.

Without being asked.

Without knowing why.

She went into the kitchen and filled the kettle.

Then she stopped.

There was something she hadn’t noticed until now.

She had told Evelyn that she didn’t live in Barcelona.

And Evelyn had simply accepted it.

No interrogation. No disappointment. No complicated discussion about honesty and trust.

She hadn’t even asked why.

She made herself coffee.

Then she sat at her desk and opened her document.

For a while she looked at the page.

She had spent the afternoon telling stories she couldn’t quite defend.

Now she had a story she could write.

She began with an elderly woman sitting in a café, eating her second slice of cake.

And a man who walked in at precisely the wrong moment.

She wrote until her coffee went cold.

Then she read the first paragraph.

She laughed.

“Honestly,” she said aloud, “you couldn’t make this shit up.”

She paused.

“Well. Apparently, you can.”

I’d read The Master and Margarita for the first time, completely unprepared for the madness waiting inside.

I’d watch The Handmaid’s Tale again without knowing what was coming. I’ve watched it several times already, but I’d love to experience that first shock again.

I’d watch Game of Thrones from the beginning, knowing absolutely nothing. No spoilers, no expectations, no idea whom to trust. And this time I’d pay attention to every tiny detail.

I’d watch Life Is Beautiful again, without knowing how something could make me smile and break my heart in the same evening.

I’d go to the theatre and experience Mademoiselle Rubinstein for the first time again. Some performances deserve to be seen twice, but only once can you have absolutely no idea what you’re walking into.

I’d discover Vivaldi again, and sit through one of his operas, allowing the music to surprise me.

I’d hear Amy Winehouse for the first time. She absolutely blew me away, and I still find it strange that I discovered her so late.

I’d hear The Cranberries again. Especially Zombie and Dreams. I’d love to remember that moment before Dolores O’Riordan’s voice became so familiar that I could recognise it anywhere.

I’d hear Metallica for the first time again. And then discover that apparently I have room in my heart for both Vivaldi and heavy metal.

I’d discover jazz all over again. Preferably in a small, dimly lit bar, with a glass of wine and no particular reason to go home.

And I’d love to hear Céline Dion’s voice with fresh ears, especially what she’s doing now, knowing nothing about the extraordinary voice I was about to hear.

I’d taste a pomegranate for the first time. I remember being fascinated that something so ordinary-looking could be filled with hundreds of little jewels.

I’d also erase my first experience with a banana. It tasted like soap. I’m still not sure who decided this was supposed to be a treat.

I’d taste kare paneer again. One of those meals that makes you wonder where the hell this dish has been all your life.

I’d try olives again, before I knew that something so small, salty and wrinkled could bring such unreasonable pleasure.

I’d taste that pistachio ice cream in Greece again. Not just any pistachio ice cream. That particular one, in that particular place, on that particular day.

I’d drink a wonderful French wine again. Unfortunately, I can’t remember its name. A serious disadvantage when trying to recreate a memory.

I’d have my first coffee again, at twenty, sitting with a colleague, completely unaware that I was beginning one of the most reliable love affairs of my life.

I’d discover Barcelona again. I’d walk through its streets without knowing which corners would stay with me long after I’d left.

I’d walk through Paris at night again, with nowhere particular to be and no desire to check the time.

I’d go back to Scotland and stay for an entire week. Actually, that one doesn’t require memory loss. Just money and someone willing to take over my responsibilities.

I’d see the mountains again for the first time. I considered putting the sea here, but the truth is, the sea never impressed me quite as much. Mountains did something to me that I still can’t properly explain.

I’d relive the first time I learned to float on my back. That strange moment when you stop moving, the water holds you, and the entire world suddenly sounds far away. As if someone has turned down the volume of existence.

I’d hear my child’s first laugh again. That funny little sound when you’re not entirely sure whether they’re laughing or about to cry, and then suddenly you realise they’re laughing. For the very first time.

And I’d ride Ferrari again.

Not the car.

A snow-white camel named Ferrari.

I remember my bare legs in shorts touching his sides as he moved, and how he smelled of milk and sun.

There are probably hundreds of other moments I’d add if I sat here long enough.

Books I couldn’t put down. Performances that left me speechless. Songs that made me stop whatever I was doing. Cities I didn’t want to leave. Conversations I wish had lasted another hour.

And probably a few utterly ridiculous things that meant nothing to anyone else.

I suppose that’s what makes memory so strange.

We remember the big events because we’re expected to.

But sometimes, twenty years later, what comes back to us most vividly is the taste of a fruit, a strange animal’s smell, or the sound of water around our ears.

If you could erase just one beautiful memory to experience it for the first time again, what would you choose?

On Wednesday, she received a message from Evelyn.

This was unexpected for several reasons, the main one being that she had never given Evelyn her phone number.

She stared at the screen.

Good morning. This is Evelyn. Are you the woman who drinks proper coffee and talks to strangers in the forest?

She read it twice.

Then she remembered that on Sunday, while helping Evelyn put her folding chair into its bag, they had exchanged numbers.

Apparently, she had forgotten.

This was mildly concerning.

She typed:

That depends. Are you the woman who serves terrible coffee and insults people she has just met?

The reply came almost immediately.

Yes. Would you like to have lunch on Friday?

She smiled.

Where?

Somewhere with chairs. I’ve had quite enough of sitting on logs.

On Friday afternoon, she found Evelyn sitting at a small table outside a café, wearing a red scarf and enormous sunglasses.

There was a newspaper beside her coffee.

She looked rather pleased with herself.

“You’re early,” Evelyn said.

“So are you.”

“Yes, but I’m old. I have fewer places to be.”

She sat down.

“That’s a terrible reason.”

“I’ve been using it for years.”

Evelyn folded her newspaper.

“Coffee?”

“Espresso.”

“Of course. I remembered.”

“I’m touched.”

“Don’t be. I wrote it down.”

She laughed.

The waiter came over. She ordered espresso, and Evelyn announced that she was having cake before lunch.

“Is that allowed?” she asked.

“By whom?”

“Fair point.”

Evelyn ordered a slice of apple cake.

Then, as an afterthought, soup.

The waiter looked uncertain about the order.

“Cake first,” Evelyn clarified. “I’m eighty-four. I no longer trust the future enough to save dessert for later.”

He smiled and walked away.

“Does that work?” she asked.

“What?”

“Being eighty-four. Getting away with absolutely everything.”

“Not everything. But I recommend trying it.”

They talked about the weather, the city, and the extraordinary number of people who seemed unable to cross a street without looking at their phones.

Evelyn had recently attended a family birthday party.

“My granddaughter turned twenty-one.”

“That’s lovely.”

“Yes. She spent most of the evening explaining why her generation is exhausted.”

“Perhaps they are.”

“Of course they are. So was I at twenty-one. But I had the decency to be exhausted privately.”

She laughed.

Evelyn smiled and stirred her coffee.

“My granddaughter thinks I’ve had a terribly conventional life.”

“Have you?”

“Not particularly.”

“What did you do?”

“Oh, all sorts of things.”

“That sounds suspicious.”

“It should.”

Evelyn told her about a summer when she was twenty-three and nearly moved to Paris.

She’d been offered a job, apparently. Something to do with a fashion house, although she was quick to explain that she had never been particularly interested in fashion.

“I just wanted to leave,” she said. “Paris seemed like a respectable place to run away to.”

“So why didn’t you go?”

“My husband.”

“You were married already?”

“Good heavens, no. I hadn’t even met him.”

She raised an eyebrow.

Evelyn looked at her.

“What?”

“You said your husband was the reason you didn’t go.”

“Yes, well. He became my husband eventually.”

“Ah.”

“Don’t give me that look.”

“What look?”

“The one that suggests you’re keeping records.”

She laughed.

Evelyn continued.

“The truth is, I was probably frightened. I didn’t speak very good French, I had very little money, and the woman who was supposed to employ me turned out to be rather unreliable.”

“So you weren’t actually offered the job?”

“I was offered the possibility of a job.”

“Right.”

“Darling, at eighty-four, I reserve the right to remember my twenties however I please.”

She laughed so loudly that the woman at the next table turned around.

Evelyn looked delighted.

“Besides,” she added, “Paris sounds much better than saying I spent that summer working in my aunt’s shop.”

“Did you?”

“Unfortunately. She sold curtains.”

“What was wrong with curtains?”

“Nothing, until you’ve spent three months explaining to people that cream and ivory are not the same colour.”

She nearly choked on her espresso.

They ordered lunch.

Evelyn’s soup arrived after the cake, as requested. She complained that it was too hot.

“That’s generally considered a positive quality in soup,” she said.

“At your age, perhaps.”

They talked about travel.

Evelyn had been to Spain several times.

“Barcelona,” she said. “I liked Barcelona.”

She looked up.

“Did you?”

“Beautiful city. Terrible experience with a taxi driver.”

“What happened?”

“He charged me twice what he should have.”

“How do you know?”

“Because my husband spent the next four days telling me.”

She laughed.

“I can imagine.”

“Have you been?”

“To Barcelona?”

“No, to the moon. Yes, Barcelona.”

She smiled.

“Yes.”

“Did you like it?”

“Very much.”

“Would you live there?”

She looked out towards the street.

A bicycle passed. A woman was struggling to fold a pushchair beside a parked car.

“I think I could.”

Evelyn nodded.

“That’s something.”

“What is?”

“Knowing where you could live.”

She considered that.

“I’m not sure I do know.”

“Neither did I. For most of my life, I thought I was meant to live wherever other people needed me.”

“And now?”

“Now I live three streets from a pharmacy, which is a very underrated achievement.”

They laughed.

Evelyn broke off a piece of bread.

“What about when you were young? What did you want to be?”

“A journalist.”

“Really?”

“Yes.”

“Were you any good?”

She hesitated.

“I thought I was.”

“That wasn’t my question.”

“I know.”

She smiled.

“I studied journalism for a while. Worked at a newspaper one summer.”

“And?”

“It didn’t quite work out.”

“Why?”

“Oh, the editor thought I needed more practice.”

“Did you?”

“Probably.”

“And that was enough to make you stop?”

She looked at Evelyn.

“No. Not exactly.”

She took a sip of coffee.

“There were other things. I was eighteen. I wanted to do everything, and somehow I ended up doing something completely different.”

“What?”

“Office work.”

“Ah. The great romance of administration.”

“Don’t mock it. Some spreadsheets are very emotionally demanding.”

Evelyn laughed.

Then she asked, “Do you regret it?”

“Sometimes.”

“That’s an irritating answer.”

“It’s the best I’ve got.”

“Fair enough.”

For a while they ate without speaking.

The café had become busier. A couple were arguing quietly over a bill, and a little boy at the next table was conducting an experiment involving a spoon and a glass of orange juice.

His mother had not yet noticed.

She watched him with interest.

“Three,” she said.

Evelyn followed her gaze.

“What?”

“Three seconds before that glass ends up on the floor.”

The boy tipped the spoon.

Orange juice spread across the table.

Evelyn sighed.

“Children. Such a wonderful argument for having grandchildren instead.”

After lunch they ordered another coffee.

Evelyn told her about the first house she’d shared with her husband. It had been small, cold and badly insulated, and they’d spent years complaining about it.

“Then we moved into a bigger one,” she said, “and spent years complaining about that.”

“Were you happier in the second?”

“Oh, probably. We had central heating.”

“That’s not quite what I meant.”

“It’s a perfectly reasonable measure of happiness.”

She smiled.

Evelyn looked across the street.

“I sometimes miss having someone to complain to.”

There was nothing particularly sad about the way she said it.

She simply said it, then reached for her coffee.

“Although,” Evelyn added, “I don’t miss having someone leave wet towels on the bed.”

“Was he terrible for that?”

“Terrible. Forty-six years of marriage, and he never understood that towels belong on hooks.”

“Perhaps he had other talents.”

“He did.”

Evelyn smiled to herself.

“Several, actually.”

“Oh, Evelyn.”

“What? I’m old, not dead.”

They both burst out laughing.

It was nearly four when they finally asked for the bill.

“I should go,” she said. “I’ve got things to do.”

“Anything interesting?”

“Laundry.”

“My condolences.”

Evelyn reached for her handbag.

“You know, I enjoyed today.”

“Me too.”

“You’re easy to talk to.”

“That’s because I do most of it.”

“Yes. I noticed.”

She laughed.

Evelyn smiled.

“And you tell a good story.”

She looked at her.

“Do I?”

“Oh, yes. Though I suspect you occasionally improve the truth.”

She felt a small, unexpected jolt.

Evelyn was putting on her coat and didn’t seem to notice.

“Everyone does,” she added. “Some people are simply less entertaining about it.”

She smiled.

“Is that your professional opinion?”

“I don’t have a profession anymore. That’s another advantage of being eighty-four.”

They stood up.

Evelyn was adjusting her scarf when someone approaching the café slowed down.

A man.

He looked at her.

Then smiled.

She recognised him a moment later.

The pizzeria.

The oregano.

The chilli oil.

Oh, God.

“Well,” he said, clearly delighted, “hello, Barcelona!”

She stared at him.

Beside her, Evelyn stopped adjusting her scarf.

“Barcelona?”

She opened her mouth.

Nothing came out.

The man was still smiling.

Evelyn looked from him to her.

Then she pulled out her chair and sat down again.

“Oh, excellent,” she said. “I’ve got time.”

On Monday morning, Laura sent her a message at 10:17.

By the way, I meant what I said on Saturday. I’d really love to read something you’ve written.

She was halfway through an Excel spreadsheet.

She read the message twice.

Then she looked around the office, as though Laura might be standing behind her, waiting for an answer.

She wasn’t.

Laura worked two floors above, where people apparently had enough time to ruin other people’s mornings.

That’s very sweet of you, she typed.

She looked at it.

Too encouraging.

She deleted it.

Of course! I’d love to show you something.

Absolutely not.

Deleted.

It’s not really ready.

That was true.

It had also been true for twenty years.

She put the phone facedown and returned to her spreadsheet.

There was something reassuring about numbers. You entered them, checked the formulas, and when something went wrong, there was usually a perfectly reasonable explanation.

A missing bracket.

An incorrect reference.

Someone in accounting.

Nobody looked at a spreadsheet and said, “I don’t think you have a voice.”

At eleven, she had a meeting.

At twelve thirty, she ate a sandwich at her desk while answering an email that had begun with Just a friendly reminder, which, in her experience, was rarely friendly.

At one fifteen, Laura appeared in the doorway.

“Oh, good. You’re alive.”

“Barely.”

“Did you get my message?”

“Yes.”

“And?”

“And what?”

Laura smiled.

“Are you going to let me read something?”

“God, you’re persistent.”

“I asked twice.”

“Exactly. It’s becoming harassment.”

Laura laughed and leaned against the doorframe.

“Look, you don’t have to. I was just curious.”

That made it worse.

She could have handled pressure. Pressure was something to resist.

Kindness was terribly inconvenient.

“I’ll see what I have,” she said.

“Lovely.”

“Don’t look so pleased. I haven’t agreed to anything.”

“Of course not.”

Laura disappeared down the corridor.

She watched her go.

“Idiot,” she muttered.

She wasn’t entirely sure which of them she meant.

At home that evening, she opened the folder on her laptop.

It was called Writing.

She had considered giving it a more interesting name, but anything more interesting would have felt like an announcement.

Inside were several documents.

Some had titles.

Others were named New Document, New Document 2, and, inexplicably, Final Version, although she had no recollection of what it was the final version of.

She opened one.

Read the first page.

Closed it.

Opened another.

That one was worse.

Not necessarily badly written. Just too close.

There was a woman standing in a bathroom, looking at herself in the mirror and trying to remember when she had stopped recognising the person looking back.

“No,” she said.

She closed it.

Another document described a woman who had left university and spent the following twenty years explaining why.

Definitely not.

She opened a third.

There was a scene in a café. A woman watched two strangers arguing about a holiday and began imagining all the reasons they might hate each other.

That was better.

There was even a reasonably funny exchange about a suitcase.

She read it again.

Then a third time.

She found a sentence she didn’t like and changed it.

The new sentence was worse.

She changed it back.

She made tea.

Then coffee, because tea had apparently been an administrative error.

By nine o’clock, she had selected four pages.

She copied them into a new document.

Removed a paragraph.

Put it back.

Changed the font.

Changed it back.

She was beginning to understand why writers went mad.

Or perhaps they were mad already, and writing simply gave them something to do about it.

She opened an email to Laura.

Hi Laura,

That was easy.

As promised, here’s a little something I’ve been working on.

She hadn’t promised.

Technically, she’d said she’d see what she had.

She deleted As promised.

Here’s a little something I’ve been working on. It’s nothing serious.

She looked at the sentence.

Why was she apologising for it?

She deleted It’s nothing serious.

Then added:

It’s just a small piece, and it isn’t finished.

She stared at that too.

“Oh, for fuck’s sake.”

She deleted the entire email and went to wash a cup.

There were three in the sink.

She washed all three, which felt like an unnecessarily ambitious response to a literary crisis.

When she came back, the document was still open.

Four pages.

Laura wasn’t a publisher. She wasn’t going to produce a formal report on the structural weaknesses of contemporary fiction.

She was a woman from work who had been nice enough to ask.

And yet.

She remembered being eighteen, sitting in a newsroom, watching an editor cross out sentences with a pen.

Not angrily. Not cruelly. Just doing his job.

She remembered feeling foolish for having written them in the first place.

She looked at the four pages again.

There was no editor now.

Nobody was holding a pen.

Laura couldn’t cross out anything unless she printed the document.

She laughed.

Then she attached the file.

Hi Laura,

Here’s a little piece I’ve been working on. No pressure to read it quickly, and please don’t feel you have to say anything clever about it.

She hesitated.

Added:

Actually, don’t say anything too clever. I’m fragile. 😂

That sounded more like her.

She pressed Send.

For approximately six seconds, she felt wonderful.

Then she opened the sent email.

There it was.

Her name.

Laura’s name.

An attachment.

Four pages that had existed only on her computer and now existed on somebody else’s.

She closed the email.

Opened it again.

Checked the attachment.

Correct file.

She checked it once more.

Still correct.

There was no reason for it to have changed in the last twelve seconds, but she appreciated the confirmation.

She put her phone in the bedroom and returned to the living room.

A few minutes later, she went to get it.

No reply.

Naturally.

Laura had probably not even opened the email.

Perhaps she was cooking dinner.

Perhaps she was watching television.

Perhaps she had a life.

She sat on the sofa and picked up a book.

Read two paragraphs.

Realised she hadn’t understood either of them.

She turned back to the first page.

Her phone remained silent.

At ten thirty, she considered sending a follow-up message.

Just so you know, you really don’t have to read it.

She didn’t send it.

At eleven, she imagined Laura opening the file and smiling politely.

At eleven fifteen, she imagined Laura finding the writing embarrassing.

At eleven thirty, she began to suspect Laura had simply fallen asleep.

She found this rather rude, considering the circumstances.

The next morning, there was a message waiting.

I read it last night.

She stopped brushing her teeth.

Toothpaste foam collected at the corner of her mouth.

She opened the message.

I really liked the woman in the café. Especially the bit about the suitcase. You’ve got a funny way of looking at people.

She read it again.

Below that was another message.

Can I read more?

She stood in the bathroom for a moment.

Then she rinsed her mouth.

Looked at herself in the mirror.

“Well,” she said.

She considered the situation.

Laura had read four pages.

She hadn’t died.

Neither had Laura, as far as she knew.

Nobody had come to confiscate her laptop.

This was all rather encouraging.

She returned to the bedroom and typed:

Careful. That’s how people end up reading an unfinished novel for the next seven years.

Laura replied almost immediately.

I’ll take my chances.

She smiled.

For a moment she considered telling Laura what she was really writing. About the woman who lived alone, the office, the forest, the conversations that sometimes went differently depending on who remembered them.

She opened that document.

Read a few lines.

Then closed it.

Not yet.

Four pages were enough for one week.

She got dressed and left for work.

On the way to the tram stop, she remembered something Laura had written.

You’ve got a funny way of looking at people.

She liked that.

She would probably remember it for a while.

Possibly for years.

And, knowing herself, she would eventually tell somebody that a woman who worked in publishing had said it.

Which wasn’t entirely untrue.

Laura did know Nina.

She laughed out loud.

A man waiting at the crossing looked at her.

“Sorry,” she said.

He looked away.

She continued towards the tram, still smiling.

Love your fate.

Nietzsche’s beautiful, rather demanding idea that we should embrace our lives so completely that we wouldn’t wish to change a single thing.

Not even the painful parts.

Especially not those.

I understand the philosophy. I really do.

I just have one small objection.

What if I don’t particularly like the person my fate has turned me into?

People love saying that they wouldn’t change anything about their past because every mistake, every disappointment and every heartbreak made them who they are today.

How wonderful.

Personally, if someone offered me a time machine, I wouldn’t stand there delivering a speech about gratitude.

I’d be inside before they finished explaining the safety instructions.

And I’d bring a notebook.

A very large notebook.

Because I can think of quite a few things I’d do differently.

And no, I’m not interested in hearing that my mistakes made me stronger.

Perhaps they did.

But I didn’t necessarily want to become stronger. Perhaps I wanted to become happier. Or lighter. Or simply someone who didn’t need quite so much strength to get through an ordinary Tuesday.

We have developed an extraordinary talent for turning suffering into inspirational material.

Everything is a lesson.

Every failure is a blessing.

Every difficult person was sent to teach us something.

At this point, I’d quite like to graduate.

Preferably without another examination.

And yet, here I am, forty years old, wondering whether it’s possible to start again.

Not improve myself.

Not become the best version of myself.

God, I’m tired of versions.

I want to take certain parts of my life, carefully cut them out, put them in a box and leave the box somewhere nobody will ever find it.

But how exactly does a person do that?

Write?

Scream?

Tell the truth?

Admit the truth?

Pack a bag and disappear into a forest?

My fictional heroine might have the right idea.

A little house among the trees, a few packets of coffee, books, silence, and absolutely nobody asking what’s for dinner.

I could imagine myself there quite happily.

For about fifteen minutes.

Then I’d remember that I have children, responsibilities, bills, and a real life that has shown absolutely no interest in disappearing simply because I’ve developed a philosophical objection to it.

And this is where all those beautiful conversations about starting over become slightly less beautiful.

Because we live in a world where reinvention is practically an industry.

Change your career.

Move abroad.

Leave what no longer serves you.

Follow your passion.

Become who you were meant to be.

Wonderful advice.

But who pays the rent while you’re becoming?

Who buys the groceries while you’re discovering yourself?

Who takes care of the children while you’re sitting in a little house in the forest trying to remember who you were before everybody needed something from you?

We send each other encouragement across the internet.

You’ve got this.

It’s never too late.

Believe in yourself.

And sometimes those words genuinely help. A kind sentence from a stranger can make an otherwise miserable day a little easier to carry.

But encouragement doesn’t pay an electricity bill.

And courage doesn’t automatically create childcare.

Starting over sounds romantic when you imagine the moment someone closes a door and walks away.

It becomes considerably more complicated when you remember that somebody still has to pay for the door.

And everybody tells us that we have to pay for our decisions.

Fair enough.

What nobody mentions is that most of the decisions we’re still paying for at forty were made when we were eighteen, twenty-two or twenty-five.

At an age when we could barely decide what to have for dinner, we were apparently qualified to make choices that would determine the next twenty years of our lives.

And the bills arrive later.

With interest.

Sometimes in the form of a mortgage, sometimes a career, sometimes a marriage, sometimes a whole collection of obligations that seemed perfectly manageable when we signed up for them.

By forty, you can be so exhausted from being useful at home and at work that opening your eyes in the morning feels like the first unpaid shift of the day.

And then someone tells you to reinvent yourself.

Wonderful.

Shall I do that before or after the laundry?

What fascinates me is how many people like this seem to exist online.

Every day I read something written by a stranger and think, My God, where have you been?

People who are tired of being responsible. People who want to leave. People who aren’t sure what they’d be leaving for. People who have spent decades doing everything reasonably well and still can’t quite explain why they’re so unhappy.

There are so many of us here, in these little corners of the internet, recognising ourselves in sentences written by people we’ve never met.

But where are these people in real life?

Are we all standing next to each other in supermarkets, discussing the price of butter while privately wondering how to dismantle our entire existence?

Do we pass each other on trains, sit beside each other in offices, wave politely across garden fences?

Perhaps we’re all too busy pretending to be functional.

And then there’s the advice.

One step at a time.

I’ve always thought that was sensible.

Until I started wondering whether it works when you’re standing in a swamp up to your neck.

Because sometimes every little movement just makes you sink deeper.

Sometimes you don’t need another tiny step towards becoming a better version of yourself.

You need to get the hell out.

One enormous, terrifying pull.

The problem is that nobody explains what you’re supposed to grab hold of.

And what if there is nothing?

What if you know exactly what’s wrong, but every possible escape route comes with another set of consequences you cannot afford?

How do you turn your life in another direction when you’re already using everything you have just to keep it moving?

And perhaps the cruelest part is the awareness.

Once you start looking honestly at your life, you can’t quite stop.

You see all the places where you compromised.

All the things you accepted.

All the conversations you avoided.

All the moments when you knew something wasn’t right and decided to deal with it later.

And you keep touching those places, like pressing a finger against a bruise to see whether it still hurts.

It does.

Of course it does.

And still you press.

As though understanding the pain thoroughly enough might somehow make it disappear.

I don’t know how to start over when you’re alone and responsible for keeping an entire life running.

I wish I did.

I haven’t moved into the forest.

I haven’t discovered a miraculous way of beginning again without money, time or consequences.

I still work. I still worry. I still have a kitchen that needs cleaning with almost offensive regularity.

But somewhere over this past year, I started writing again.

After nearly twenty years.

And then I wrote a little more.

And then someone read it.

Then someone else.

And suddenly I was having conversations with people I’d never met, about things I’d spent years keeping to myself.

It didn’t solve my problems.

And I don’t particularly want to turn it into another inspirational story about finding myself through creativity.

I haven’t found myself.

At the moment, I’m not entirely sure I even want this version back.

But writing has given me a place to say things I couldn’t say anywhere else.

And sometimes I wonder what I’m supposed to do with all the things I’ve started to understand.

Because understanding your life and knowing how to change it are two very different things.

As for amor fati, perhaps Nietzsche and I simply need to agree to disagree.

He can love his fate.

I’m still negotiating with mine.

And I’d very much like to see the cancellation policy.

On Sunday morning, she woke up with a headache.

Not a particularly serious one, but enough to remind her that she’d had three glasses of wine the night before.

“Two,” she corrected herself.

She lay in bed for another minute.

“Two and a half.”

The third had been mostly water anyway.

She got up, drank an enormous glass of water and looked at her phone.

Laura had sent seventeen photographs from the birthday dinner.

In eleven of them, she appeared to be speaking.

In one she was pointing at Martin with the expression of a woman delivering a verdict.

And in another, taken towards the end of the evening, she had her head thrown back, laughing.

She liked that photograph.

It was strange how rarely she saw herself laughing. She did it quite often, or at least she thought she did, but most photographs of her showed the same polite smile.

She saved the picture.

Then she made coffee.

By midday, the headache had disappeared, the weather was better than expected, and she’d spent almost an hour pretending to clean the kitchen while actually listening to a podcast about a woman who had married the same man twice.

“Why?” she asked the refrigerator.

The refrigerator made its usual unpleasant noise.

“Exactly.”

She turned off the podcast, put on her walking shoes and went out.

The forest was quieter than she’d expected.

It had rained during the night, and the air smelled of wet leaves and earth. The paths were muddy in places, and she was glad she’d chosen her old boots instead of the newer ones.

She walked her usual route.

Past the fallen tree, along the path that climbed gently between the firs, then towards the clearing where she sometimes sat and watched people pass.

Today there were hardly any people.

A man with a dog.

Two women walking very quickly and discussing someone called Michael, who had apparently done something unforgivable involving a dishwasher.

She wanted to know more.

Unfortunately, they were going in the opposite direction.

“Michael, you bastard,” she murmured.

Then she remembered the house.

She hadn’t planned to visit it again.

In fact, she’d barely thought about it since finding it the previous weekend, apart from once or twice when she’d wondered who had lived there.

But now she was near the turning.

And she wasn’t in a hurry.

“Ten minutes,” she said.

She took the narrower path.

It was muddier than before. At one point she had to step around a puddle large enough to qualify as a small lake.

“Lovely. Very scenic.”

She walked on.

The roof appeared first, just as it had the last time.

Then the dirty windows, the old porch and the garden that had long ago stopped caring what anybody thought of it.

Nothing had changed.

Except there was a woman sitting in front of the house.

An elderly woman.

Very elderly, actually.

She was sitting on a folding chair with a thermos beside her and a paper bag on her lap. She wore a dark green coat, sturdy shoes and a knitted hat that looked far too cheerful for the rest of her outfit.

She was eating something.

The woman noticed her almost immediately.

They looked at each other.

“Well,” the older woman said. “Are you lost?”

“No.”

“That’s a pity. I was hoping to be useful.”

She smiled.

“Sorry to disappoint you.”

“Oh, don’t worry. I’ve had years of practice.”

The older woman took another bite of her sandwich.

There was a pause.

“Do you live here?” she asked.

The woman looked over her shoulder at the house.

“Good God, no.”

“Right.”

“Do I look that desperate?”

She laughed.

“No. Sorry. I just wondered.”

“It’s all right. At my age, people wonder all sorts of things. Mostly whether I can still hear them.”

“Can you?”

“Unfortunately.”

She laughed again.

The woman studied her for a moment.

“You’ve been here before.”

It wasn’t a question.

“Yes. Last weekend.”

“I thought so.”

“Did you see me?”

“No. You’ve got mud on the same leg as last time.”

She looked down.

The older woman grinned.

“I’m joking, dear. I’ve never seen you in my life.”

“Oh, for God’s sake.”

That made the woman laugh.

She had a lovely laugh, low and slightly rough, as though she’d spent a great many years finding things funny that other people considered inappropriate.

She lifted the thermos.

“Coffee?”

She hesitated.

The woman sighed.

“Don’t worry. I’m not planning to poison you. It’s terribly inconvenient at my age. All those questions from the police.”

“I wasn’t worried about poison.”

“Then you’re less sensible than you look.”

She glanced at the thermos.

“Actually, I’ve already had two coffees.”

“Then one more won’t kill you.”

“That sounds like something a doctor shouldn’t say.”

“Good thing I’m not a doctor.”

The woman poured coffee into a small cup and held it out.

She took it.

“Thank you.”

“It’s dreadful, by the way.”

She tasted it.

It was.

She tried not to show it.

“Oh, don’t pretend,” the woman said. “I’ve been making bad coffee for eighty years. I’m perfectly aware of my limitations.”

They both laughed.

She remained standing for a moment, then sat on a fallen log a little way from the chair.

The older woman offered her a biscuit from the paper bag.

She accepted that too.

For a while they sat without speaking.

A bird moved through the branches above them. Somewhere deeper in the forest, a dog barked.

The house stood behind them, silent and filthy.

“It’s a strange place for a picnic,” she said eventually.

“Is it?”

“A little.”

“People sit in parks and stare at other people. I sit in forests and stare at trees. I know which one I prefer.”

She nodded.

“Fair enough.”

“Besides, this isn’t a picnic. It’s lunch.”

“Of course. My mistake.”

“Picnics require planning. And usually somebody brings potato salad.”

“Do you dislike potato salad?”

“I dislike people who are very proud of their potato salad.”

She laughed.

The woman looked pleased.

“What’s your name?” she asked.

She told her.

“I’m Evelyn.”

“Nice to meet you.”

“Yes, well. We’ll see.”

Another laugh.

She was beginning to like Evelyn.

There was something wonderfully refreshing about someone who made no effort whatsoever to seem agreeable.

“Do you come here often?” she asked.

“Sometimes.”

“Why here?”

Evelyn looked at the house.

“Why not?”

“It’s a bit depressing.”

“It’s a house.”

“A very unhappy-looking house.”

“Perhaps it likes being left alone.”

She considered that.

“Possibly.”

Evelyn took another biscuit.

“Or perhaps it’s simply falling apart. Not everything needs a personality.”

She burst out laughing.

“Fair point.”

They watched a squirrel run across the roof.

It disappeared behind the loose gutter.

“That,” Evelyn said, “is almost certainly the current owner.”

“Doesn’t seem to be maintaining the property.”

“Probably inherited it.”

She smiled into her terrible coffee.

After a while, Evelyn asked what she did.

She told her about her office job.

Evelyn listened politely for perhaps thirty seconds.

“That sounds dreadful.”

“It’s not dreadful.”

“Is it interesting?”

“Sometimes.”

“Do you enjoy it?”

She thought about the question.

“Not particularly.”

“Then why are you defending it?”

She laughed.

“Because it pays me.”

“Oh. That’s a perfectly respectable reason.”

Evelyn reached into her bag and took out another sandwich.

“Would you like half?”

“No, thank you.”

“Good. I was hoping you’d say that.”

She unwrapped it.

There was something very comforting about sitting beside a person who had no intention of making an occasion out of their meeting.

She asked Evelyn whether she lived nearby.

“In town.”

“Do you live alone?”

“Yes.”

“Me too.”

Evelyn nodded.

“My husband died some years ago.”

“I’m sorry.”

“So was I.”

She took a bite of her sandwich.

“He was a good man. Mostly.”

She smiled.

“Mostly?”

“Nobody’s a good man every day of his life. That would be exhausting for everyone involved.”

She laughed.

Evelyn continued eating.

“I have children. They’re grown. Live elsewhere. They telephone.”

“That sounds nice.”

“It is. Though my son calls me every Sunday and asks whether I’m eating properly.”

“Are you?”

Evelyn looked down at the sandwich.

“Apparently not.”

She laughed.

“He worries,” Evelyn said. “Which is sweet, but sometimes I’d like to tell him I’ve managed to keep myself alive for eighty-four years without his assistance.”

“Have you told him?”

“Of course. He says I ought to eat more vegetables.”

They sat together for a while longer.

The conversation wandered, as conversations sometimes do when neither person has anywhere important to be.

Evelyn had strong opinions about supermarket bread, modern television and people who walked through forests while playing music on their phones.

She also liked detective novels, hated gardening and believed most restaurants served portions designed for people recovering from surgery.

Our heroine found herself talking more than she’d intended.

About books.

About the city.

About how difficult it had become to find a café where people didn’t spend the entire time photographing their food.

Evelyn agreed.

“Last week a woman took twelve pictures of her soup.”

“Perhaps it was exceptionally beautiful soup.”

“It was lentil.”

“Ah.”

“And then she complained it was cold.”

They both laughed.

Eventually Evelyn checked her watch.

“I’d better go.”

“Someone waiting for you?”

“No. But I’ve been sitting here long enough that I’ll need help getting up if I stay another half hour.”

She stood, carefully folded her chair and packed the thermos into her bag.

The younger woman offered to carry it.

“Thank you, but I can manage.”

They walked together as far as the main path.

Evelyn moved slowly but steadily, occasionally commenting on the state of the ground.

At the turning, they stopped.

“Well,” Evelyn said. “That was pleasant.”

“It was.”

“Unexpectedly.”

“Thank you.”

“You’re welcome.”

She smiled.

“Will you be here again?”

Evelyn adjusted the strap of her bag.

“Possibly. I’m terribly unreliable.”

Then she looked at her.

“And you?”

“I walk here quite often.”

“Then perhaps we’ll meet.”

“Perhaps.”

Evelyn started down the path.

After a few steps, she turned around.

“Oh, and one thing.”

“Yes?”

“If you come here again, bring better coffee.”

She laughed.

“Gladly.”

“And don’t bring one of those ridiculous machines.”

“What machines?”

“The ones that make coffee and sound as though they’re trying to launch a spacecraft.”

“I drink espresso.”

Evelyn considered this.

“Fine. You’re forgiven.”

Then she continued walking.

She watched her go.

There was no particular reason why she’d enjoyed their conversation so much.

They’d discussed almost nothing important.

Bad coffee. Bread. Children. Books. Cold soup.

She hadn’t learned why Evelyn came to the house. Evelyn hadn’t asked why she was interested in it.

Neither had promised anything.

She looked back towards the narrow path.

The house was hidden by the trees again.

She wondered whether Evelyn knew who owned it.

She could have asked.

Strangely, she hadn’t thought to.

“Oh well,” she said.

She turned towards home.

Halfway down the path, she remembered the thermos.

Next time, she thought, she could bring coffee.

Then she laughed at herself.

Next time.

She had known Evelyn for less than an hour.

And already she was making arrangements with a woman who hadn’t agreed to meet her.

“Excellent,” she said aloud. “I’ve adopted a stranger.”

A man passing with a dog glanced at her.

She smiled politely.

“Not you.”

He walked a little faster.

She laughed all the way to the clearing.

The first decision was made in the shower.

The second while drying her hair.

The third while standing in front of her wardrobe, wondering how a person could own so many clothes and still have absolutely nothing suitable for dinner with eight people she didn’t particularly want to see.

“It’s a birthday,” she reminded herself. “Not a job interview.”

This did not help.

Three weeks earlier, her colleague Laura had invited her to a birthday dinner.

She had said yes immediately.

Three weeks was a wonderfully safe distance from any social obligation. You could agree to practically anything three weeks in advance.

A marathon. A wedding. Helping someone move house.

Then, quite unexpectedly, the day arrived.

Laura was turning forty-two. She worked in another department and was one of the few people in the office who could make her laugh before ten in the morning, which was no small achievement.

They sometimes had lunch together. Occasionally complained about management. Once, during a particularly terrible meeting, Laura had written PLEASE KILL ME on a sticky note and slid it across the table.

She had written underneath:

You’ll have to submit a request first.

They’d been friends, in a loose office sort of way, ever since.

Still, spending eight hours a day with someone was one thing. Voluntarily spending Saturday evening with their colleagues was quite another.

She changed her shirt.

Again.

“Perfect,” she told her reflection. “Now you look like someone who has a parent-teacher meeting.”

She put on a black dress.

Better.

At seven thirty, she left the apartment.

She was almost halfway to the restaurant when she remembered the birthday present was still sitting on her kitchen counter.

“Of course it is.”

She went back.

By the time she arrived, she was twelve minutes late.

“Sorry,” she announced, approaching the table. “I forgot your present, went home to get it, and considered staying there.”

Laura stood up laughing and hugged her.

“At least you’re honest.”

“Give me twenty minutes and some wine. That’ll change.”

The restaurant was small and crowded, with low lighting and tables placed close enough together that several completely unrelated people were already participating in the same conversation.

Laura introduced her to everyone.

There were two colleagues she knew, Laura’s sister, a couple who had been friends with Laura since university, a man whose name she immediately forgot, and a woman called Nina who worked in publishing.

That last detail made her look up.

“Publishing?”

“Yes. Mostly educational books.”

“Oh.”

“Disappointed?”

“A little. I was hoping for an exciting story about a drunken novelist.”

Nina laughed.

“You’d be surprised how dramatic educational publishing can get.”

“Really?”

She liked Nina.

They ordered food. Wine appeared. Someone complained about the price of parking, which led to a discussion about how everything had become expensive except salaries.

Laura’s sister had recently bought a house and was discovering that ownership was mainly the privilege of paying enormous sums of money for things nobody could see.

“Last week,” she said, “we spent nine hundred euros on a pipe.”

“What did it do?” she asked.

“Leak.”

“For nine hundred euros, I’d expect it to sing.”

The table laughed.

She took another sip of wine.

She was beginning to enjoy herself.

This often happened. She could spend an entire afternoon dreading an evening and then, once she’d arrived, wonder why she didn’t go out more often.

The difficulty was never being with people.

It was the process of getting there.

By the time the main courses arrived, everyone was talking over everyone else.

One of her colleagues was describing a disastrous online date. Laura’s sister insisted that her husband had become obsessed with growing tomatoes despite having killed every plant they’d ever owned.

The man whose name she’d forgotten turned out to be called Martin.

He worked in insurance.

For some reason, he was extraordinarily funny.

She had nothing against insurance. She simply hadn’t expected it.

“So what do you do when you’re not working?” Nina asked her.

“Recover.”

“From what?”

“Working.”

Nina laughed.

“No, seriously.”

“I read. Walk a lot. Occasionally convince myself I’m going to become a completely different person by Monday.”

“And does it work?”

“Not once. But I remain optimistic.”

“What would you do if you didn’t have to work?”

She thought for a moment.

“Write, probably.”

“What do you write?”

“Oh, all sorts of things.”

“Have you published anything?”

“No.”

“Are you working on something?”

“Yes. Sort of.”

“What sort of?”

She put down her glass.

“The sort where I write three pages, decide they’re terrible, then read them again the next day and decide they’re actually quite good.”

“That sounds familiar,” Nina said.

“Are you a writer?”

“No. I just know quite a few.”

“Well, please don’t tell them about me. I’m not ready to join the profession.”

Nina smiled.

“Why not?”

“Because then people might read what I’ve written.”

“Isn’t that the point?”

“That’s what makes it such a badly designed occupation.”

Nina laughed, and someone at the other end of the table called her over to settle an argument about whether audiobooks counted as reading.

She leaned back in her chair, relieved to have escaped.

Laura turned towards her.

“I didn’t know you were writing again.”

“Neither did I, until recently.”

“What are you writing?”

“A story.”

“About what?”

“A woman.”

“What happens to her?”

“She has a job she doesn’t particularly like and spends far too much time talking to herself.”

Laura stared at her.

“So it’s an autobiography?”

“Excuse me. My character is much better dressed.”

They laughed.

“Will you let me read it?”

There it was.

A perfectly harmless question, asked by a perfectly nice person who probably meant it kindly.

She looked at Laura.

“Oh, absolutely. The moment I develop a completely different personality.”

“Come on.”

“No, really. I’m working on it.”

“On the book?”

“On the personality.”

Laura laughed and let the matter drop.

She was grateful.

By dessert, she’d had two glasses of wine and was feeling especially fond of humanity.

Even Martin, who had begun discussing his mortgage.

She listened with sympathy until he mentioned the interest rate.

“God,” she said. “I’d rather hear about your sex life.”

“It’s roughly as depressing.”

“Then let’s have another bottle.”

They did not need another bottle.

They ordered one anyway.

Somewhere between the coffee and the bill, the conversation turned to missed opportunities.

Laura’s sister had wanted to study medicine but had been discouraged by her parents. Martin had once been offered a job in Canada and turned it down because of a girlfriend he no longer spoke to. Nina had always wanted to open a bookshop, although she admitted she would probably hate having customers.

“What about you?” someone asked.

She had been listening to Martin argue that Canada was overrated, despite never having been there.

“What about me?”

“Anything you wish you’d done differently?”

“Oh, God. How much time have you got?”

“Pick one.”

She smiled.

“I wish I hadn’t stopped writing.”

The answer surprised her a little.

Not because it was untrue.

Because she’d said it without dressing it up first.

“For how long?” Nina asked.

“About twenty years.”

“Twenty years?”

“Give or take.”

“Why?”

She looked at the candle burning between the empty plates.

“I don’t know.”

There were several answers she could have given.

She could have told them about the newsroom. About the editor. About the university classes she’d stopped attending. She knew how to turn all of that into a story people would listen to.

Instead, she shrugged.

“I suppose I kept thinking I’d start again when I had more time.”

“And did you?”

“Apparently, I had twenty years.”

Martin laughed.

So did she.

The conversation moved on to something else.

Nobody asked her to explain.

For the rest of the evening she was cheerful, noisy and occasionally inappropriate. She told a story about a terrible hotel she’d once stayed in and made everyone laugh so hard that Laura had to put down her wine.

At midnight they finally began putting on their coats.

Outside, the air was cold and smelled faintly of rain.

Laura hugged her.

“I’m glad you came.”

“Me too. Against all expectations.”

“And I do want to read your story one day.”

She made a face.

“Don’t ruin a lovely evening.”

Laura laughed and climbed into a taxi.

She walked home.

The streets were quiet. A few people were still sitting outside bars, smoking and talking. Somewhere a man was singing badly, with enormous confidence.

“Good for you,” she muttered.

She felt pleasantly tired.

And a little drunk.

Not enough to regret anything. Just enough to find the world more forgiving than usual.

At home she kicked off her shoes, drank a glass of water and opened her laptop.

The document was exactly where she’d left it.

She read the last page.

It wasn’t bad.

She read the first page.

Also not bad.

Then she imagined Laura reading it.

She imagined Laura pausing at a sentence, frowning slightly, wondering what on earth she was trying to say.

She closed the laptop.

“Nope.”

She went to the bathroom, washed her face and brushed her teeth.

Halfway through, she remembered something Nina had said about writers.

Or perhaps Nina hadn’t said it.

There had been so many conversations.

She couldn’t remember exactly.

Back in the bedroom, she switched off the light.

For a while she lay awake, thinking about the evening.

About Laura laughing. Nina’s publishing stories. Martin and his apparently disastrous romantic life.

About the question.

Will you let me read it?

She rolled over.

“Maybe,” she said into the darkness.

Then, after a moment:

“Don’t get excited.”

And went to sleep.

She had been arguing with someone for at least twenty minutes.

The unfortunate person was not there, which made the conversation considerably easier.

“No, that is not what I said.”

She stepped over a fallen branch.

“What I said was that you can’t expect someone to do three people’s jobs and then complain that they’re not smiling enough.”

A pause.

“And another thing—”

She stopped.

“No. Actually, that’s enough. You’ve had quite enough of my time.”

The trees offered no opinion.

This was one of the many reasons she liked them.

She had been walking in this forest for years. She knew most of its paths, although she couldn’t have told anyone their names, if they had names at all. There was the one with the fallen tree, the one that became a small river whenever it rained, and the one that led to a bench where someone had carved L + M FOREVER into the wood.

She had been watching that relationship for nearly six years.

The bench was still there.

She hoped L and M were doing equally well.

It was Saturday, and she had come here because there was nothing she particularly wanted to do at home.

Her apartment was clean enough. The laundry could wait. She had already spent an unreasonable amount of time looking at her phone, where people she didn’t know were having arguments she hadn’t been invited to.

She had briefly considered joining one.

Then she’d put on her shoes.

The forest was better.

Here, nobody expected an answer to an email, nobody wanted to know what she was doing with her life, and nobody asked why she was walking alone.

She could walk for two hours without speaking to another human being and still talk as much as she liked.

Sometimes she talked about things that had happened. Sometimes about things she wished had happened. Quite often, she gave interviews.

Usually to herself.

“So when did you first realise you wanted to be a writer?”

She considered the question.

“Well, that’s rather complicated.”

She walked a little farther.

“I suppose I always wanted to write. I just didn’t do very much about it.”

That sounded terrible.

She tried again.

“I took a rather long break.”

Better.

“Twenty years, actually.”

She laughed.

“Jesus Christ. Even maternity leave doesn’t last that long.”

A bird flew out of a bush beside her, making her jump.

“Oh, fuck off. I wasn’t talking to you.”

She carried on.

The trouble with imaginary interviews was that the interviewer tended to ask exactly the questions she didn’t want to answer.

She had been thinking about writing more lately. Not in the vague way she sometimes thought about learning Italian or becoming the kind of woman who regularly changed her bedsheets on a Sunday. She had actually opened documents. Written sentences. Deleted some of them. Kept others.

There were stories saved on her computer that nobody had ever read.

Not Anna. Not anyone.

Over the years she’d moved them from one computer to another, occasionally changing the file names, as if that counted as progress.

Some were unfinished. Some were probably terrible. A few, she thought, might actually be good.

She wasn’t entirely comfortable with that last possibility.

A good story was something a person might want to read.

And then they might have an opinion.

She preferred her stories in their current arrangement, where everybody got along.

She reached a familiar turning and took the path on the left.

Usually she went right.

She didn’t notice until several minutes later.

“Well, that’s new.”

It wasn’t entirely new. She had seen the path before. She just hadn’t taken it, partly because she knew where the other one led and partly because she had once heard that people could walk in circles in forests without realising it.

She had no intention of becoming one of those people whose disappearance led to a documentary.

Still, the path was clear enough.

She checked her phone. There was a signal. She had plenty of battery.

“Very adventurous,” she told herself.

Then she went on.

At first, there was nothing particularly interesting. Trees, more trees, a small clearing, and a great deal of undergrowth.

She walked for another ten minutes, enjoying the unfamiliarity of it.

Then, through the branches, she saw a roof.

She stopped.

It took her a moment to understand what she was looking at.

There was a house.

Or something that had once been a house.

It stood a little way back from the path, half hidden by trees and bushes. The roof sagged slightly on one side, and the walls were covered with patches of green. The windows were so dirty she couldn’t see through them. Weeds had grown across what must once have been a garden, and one of the gutters hung loose beneath the roof.

It looked dreadful.

“Oh, you poor thing.”

She moved closer.

There was no fence to speak of, just a few rotten posts and a stretch of wire almost swallowed by the bushes. The front door had once been painted blue, or perhaps green. It was difficult to tell.

She stood in front of the house with her hands in her pockets.

“Well,” she said, “I’ve seen worse.”

She thought about that.

“Actually, no. I don’t think I have.”

There were two windows downstairs and one above them, tucked beneath the roof. A small porch leaned towards the garden. Beside it stood a chair with one broken leg.

She wondered who had put it there.

Someone must have sat on that porch once. Perhaps every morning, with coffee. Perhaps they had hated the place and spent years dreaming of leaving. Perhaps they had been very happy.

She imagined a woman hanging washing between the trees. A man bringing home groceries. Someone calling a child in for dinner.

Then she imagined an old woman living there alone, refusing to move into town because she knew every sound the house made and couldn’t bear the thought of sleeping somewhere unfamiliar.

She liked the old woman.

She gave her a dog.

Then two cats.

“That’s excessive,” she said. “One cat.”

She walked slowly along the front of the house.

The garden had grown so wild that it was difficult to tell where anything had originally been planted. There might have been flowers once. A few stones formed the remains of a path leading towards the door.

She was about to turn back when she noticed that a narrow strip through the weeds was less overgrown than the rest.

It wasn’t exactly a path. Just a suggestion of one.

She looked at it.

“Interesting.”

Perhaps animals used it.

Perhaps someone came here occasionally.

She glanced at the windows again, but they gave nothing away.

For a moment she wondered whether she ought to go up to the door.

Then she looked down at her shoes.

“No. Absolutely not.”

She had already managed to get mud on one trouser leg, and there was a perfectly good chance the porch would collapse under her.

Besides, she had no business poking around somebody else’s property.

She stood there another minute.

There was something odd about finding a house like this in a place she thought she knew so well. All those years walking through the forest, taking the same paths, and here it had been.

She tried to imagine how long it had been empty.

Five years? Twenty?

She had no idea.

A gust of wind moved the branches above the roof.

Somewhere behind the house, a bird started making a noise that sounded remarkably like a broken alarm clock.

“Not a great neighbourhood,” she said.

She smiled.

Then she turned around and walked back towards the main path.

She wasn’t thinking about buying the house. She didn’t know whether anyone owned it, whether it could still be lived in, or whether it was even safe to enter.

By the time she reached the familiar turning, she was thinking about lunch.

She was hungry.

This seemed a reasonable response to two hours of walking.

On the way home, she passed a bakery and bought a sandwich she could have made herself for a quarter of the price.

“Financial independence,” she murmured, handing over her card.

The woman behind the counter smiled politely.

At home, she took off her muddy shoes and made coffee.

Her phone had several notifications. Anna had sent her a photograph of a particularly ugly handbag with the message:

For you. I think it captures your personality.

She replied:

Too cheerful.

Then she sat down at her desk.

Her computer was still open on the document she’d been working on the night before.

There were three paragraphs.

She read them.

Changed a word.

Changed it back.

Then she wrote another sentence.

Outside, someone was dragging a wheelie bin across the pavement. Upstairs, a neighbour dropped something heavy. The refrigerator made its usual strange noise, which she had decided to ignore until it became financially unavoidable.

She kept writing.

After a while she stopped to think, her fingers resting on the keyboard.

For no particular reason, she remembered the house.

The dirty windows. The crooked porch. The chair with the broken leg.

She wondered what the rooms looked like.

Probably terrible.

There was no reason to think otherwise.

She took another sip of coffee and returned to her story.

An hour later, she had written nearly two pages.

She was rather pleased with them.

She saved the document.

Then, because she couldn’t help herself, she read the first paragraph again.

“Oh, don’t start,” she told herself.

She closed the laptop.

Later that evening, as she was brushing her teeth, she remembered something else about the house.

The upstairs window had been slightly smaller than the ones below.

She could picture it quite clearly.

She wondered what someone would see from there.

Trees, probably.

Nothing but trees.

She rinsed her toothbrush.

“Not bad,” she said to her reflection.

She wasn’t sure whether she meant the house or the two pages.

Perhaps both.

Why didn’t you hold me in your arms?

Why did your hands, and you yourself, become something I wanted to run away from, instead of somewhere I could feel safe?

Why wasn’t home a safe place for me? Why was it the place I wanted to escape?

And why could we never talk openly?

Why did I always have to invent stories about myself? Make up a better version of my life, or sometimes an entirely different one?

Why couldn’t I simply tell you the truth?

Why couldn’t I ever just be myself?

Sometimes it was because I was afraid of being punished. Sometimes I hid things I had done because I already knew you wouldn’t approve.

And after a while, I suppose hiding became easier than explaining.

But it wasn’t only about punishment.

I never really felt that you accepted us as we were.

I know you were hard on yourself, too. You were the middle child, and perhaps there are things about your own childhood that I still don’t understand.

You were harsh with yourself, and you were harsh with us.

I can see that now.

But I still wonder why being your daughter so often meant being afraid of your reaction rather than looking forward to telling you something.

And it wasn’t only the bad things I kept from you.

I kept the good things to myself, too.

Because you weren’t always someone I could share my happiness with.

Sometimes I would tell you something that made me happy, and by the end of the conversation, the happiness had somehow faded.

I don’t know how else to describe it.

It was still the same good thing. Nothing about it had changed.

But it no longer felt quite as good.

And now I’m forty.

And nothing has really changed.

We still talk about the weather.

Whether it’s raining here. Whether it’s cold where you are. Whether winter is coming early this year.

Forty years, Mom.

And we still talk about the weather.

I don’t know whether you see the distance between us.

Maybe you do. Maybe you’ve known about it for years. I don’t know whether you understand how deep it goes, or whether you’ve ever wanted to change anything.

And I think I’ve stopped waiting to find out.

I’m not writing this because I expect an apology. I’m not asking you to explain yourself, and I’m not hoping that one conversation will somehow give us the relationship we never had.

I just want to say the things I’ve spent most of my life not saying.

Because I’m forty now, Mom, and I still don’t know what it feels like to tell you everything without first deciding which parts of myself I should leave out.

We still talk about the weather.

And perhaps we always will.

But there was so much more I wanted to tell you.

This letter was never sent.

This Letter Is Going Somewhere.

I’ve decided to do something slightly unreasonable with this letter.

I’m going to write it out by hand and send the original to four strangers.

Not four copies. One actual letter.

And I’d like those strangers to answer.

The first person will receive my letter, read it, write a reply by hand, and place both letters in an envelope.

Then they’ll send everything to the second person.

The second will read both letters, add their own reply, and send the growing collection to the third.

And so on, until the fourth person sends the entire correspondence back to me.

Four strangers. Four handwritten replies. One letter that gets a little heavier with every journey.

I have no idea what I’ll receive in the end.

Perhaps someone will understand exactly what I mean. Perhaps someone will see things differently. Perhaps a mother will write back. Or a daughter. Or someone who has never experienced anything remotely similar.

I don’t want to choose what people will say.

That’s the whole point.

And I’m quite curious to see what happens when I let four strangers have the last word.

Would you like to be one of the four?

For our first journey, I’m looking for four volunteers who are willing to receive a handwritten letter and send it onwards.

A few rules:

1. Write by hand. Your handwriting doesn’t have to be beautiful. Crossed-out words, mistakes and terrible spelling are welcome. I want your words, not a perfectly polished performance.

2. Be yourself. You don’t have to agree with me, comfort me or offer advice. You can write about your own experience or what the letter made you think or feel.

3. Keep everything together. The original letter and every handwritten reply must travel together. Please don’t remove or alter anyone else’s pages.

4. Forward the letter within seven days. If something prevents you from doing so, just let me know. We’ll work it out.

5. Protect everyone’s privacy. Don’t publish photographs of the letters, names, addresses or any private details without permission. Your reply will be read by the remaining participants and by me.

6. Addresses will be arranged privately. You’ll know how the forwarding works before agreeing to participate. Your address will only be shared with the person who needs it for delivery, with your permission.

7. The journey is free. There’s no participation fee. Each participant covers the postage for forwarding the letter, and we’ll confirm the route and expected costs before starting.

You may remain anonymous in any future public account of the journey. I will ask for separate permission before sharing or quoting your handwritten reply publicly.

If you’re interested, please contact me privately and tell me which country you’re in. No postal addresses in the comments, please.

And if you would rather reply online, the comments are open.

You don’t need to participate in the postal journey to be part of The Letters Nobody Sent.

Eventually, I’d love for other people’s letters to travel too.

But for now, I’ll go first.

I’m sending a letter I never intended to deliver to the person it was written for.

And trusting four strangers to bring it home.

One letter. Four strangers. No idea what comes back.

It involves people, letters, a little curiosity, and eventually, if everything goes according to plan, the postal services of several countries.

Which, admittedly, is where my confidence begins to weaken.

But let me explain.

I wonder how many letters we carry around without ever writing them.

Letters to people we loved, people we lost, people we never quite forgave. To our parents, our children, our former friends, the person we almost married, or the person we wish we’d never met.

Perhaps even to ourselves.

Some of those letters are angry. Some are full of love. Some contain questions we’ve been asking in our heads for twenty years.

And some are addressed to people who are no longer alive, which makes the delivery arrangements rather inconvenient.

We rehearse these conversations while driving, showering, washing dishes or lying awake at three in the morning. We find exactly the right words, deliver magnificent speeches, win arguments that happened fifteen years ago, and then get up the next morning and say absolutely nothing.

I’m particularly talented at this.

But recently I’ve started wondering what would happen if we actually wrote those letters down.

Not necessarily to send them to the people they were intended for.

Just to give them somewhere to exist outside our heads.

And then I had another thought.

What if somebody answered?

Not necessarily the intended recipient. Perhaps someone who has lived through something similar. Someone who sees the situation completely differently. Someone who recognises themselves in the person being addressed.

A complete stranger.

I find that possibility fascinating.

We spend years trying to explain ourselves to the people closest to us, and sometimes a stranger understands what we’re saying in five minutes.

Of course, sometimes strangers misunderstand us spectacularly.

That could be interesting too.

So I’ve decided to start a little experiment.

The Letters Nobody Sent.

I’ll begin by writing and publishing one of my own letters.

Then I’d like to invite you to send yours.

To anyone. Or anything.

A person, a country, your childhood, your body, your first love, the life you thought you’d have by forty.

There are no restrictions on whom a letter can be addressed to.

With your permission, I’ll publish selected letters here. You can remain anonymous or use your name. That’s entirely your decision.

And anyone who reads a letter can respond.

Not to diagnose the writer, not to explain how they should have lived, and certainly not to deliver a compulsory lesson about forgiveness.

Just to write back.

Maybe the reply will be a few sentences. Maybe another letter. Maybe a completely different perspective.

I don’t want to know in advance.

But there’s another part to this experiment.

Some of these letters are going to travel.

Actual letters. On paper. Written by hand.

One original letter will leave its author and travel to a stranger. That person will read it, write a reply by hand, place both letters in an envelope and send them to the next person.

And so on.

Every new reader will receive the original letter along with all the previous replies.

Different countries. Different ages. Different handwriting. Different lives.

Eventually, the whole collection will make its way back to the person who wrote the first letter.

At least that’s the plan.

We will be depending on strangers, international postal systems and the continued existence of people who know how to hold a pen.

What could possibly go wrong?

We’ll start small, with one letter and four strangers. I’ll explain how to take part, including the privacy arrangements, when the first letter is published.

The online project will be open to everyone. You won’t need to pay to write, read or reply. Nobody’s identity or private correspondence will be shared without their permission.

And if you never want your letter to leave the internet, that’s perfectly fine too.

I’m not trying to build a therapy group or an advice column. I’m interested in people, in the things we don’t say, and in what might happen when someone we have never met decides to answer.

Perhaps nothing extraordinary will happen.

Perhaps we’ll discover that people on opposite sides of the world have been having remarkably similar conversations in their heads.

Or perhaps someone will receive an answer to a question they stopped asking years ago.

I genuinely don’t know.

That’s why I want to try.

I’ll write the first letter.

After that, perhaps we can write the rest together.

Because sometimes the person we wanted to hear from never answers.

But someone else might.

She was wearing jeans and a white T-shirt.

Nothing special. She hadn’t particularly thought about what to wear, although now, standing outside the newspaper office, she wondered whether she should have.

Perhaps something more serious.

A shirt, maybe.

Did journalists wear shirts?

The woman who had interviewed them about the internship had been wearing jeans, so probably not.

Beside her stood a girl from her university course, looking considerably more relaxed.

“Ready?” her friend asked.

“Absolutely not.”

“Come on.”

“Give me a minute.”

“You’ve already had five.”

She looked at the building.

It wasn’t particularly impressive. A small local newspaper, a few offices, people going in and out. Nothing about it suggested that important things were happening inside.

But there were journalists in there.

Real ones.

People who called strangers and asked questions without first spending twenty minutes preparing themselves psychologically.

People who knew how to write articles that actually got published.

She had finished her first year at university.

There was, she felt, quite a difference.

“Right,” she said. “Let’s go.”

They went inside.

The newsroom was smaller than she’d imagined. Desks, computers, newspapers lying around, telephones ringing. Somebody was looking for a stapler.

Not quite the exciting world of journalism she’d imagined when she applied to university.

Nobody shouted about breaking news.

Nobody rushed towards the door carrying a notebook.

A woman was having an argument with the printer.

She found that oddly reassuring.

At least printers were a universal problem.

They were introduced to the staff, shown where to sit and given a brief explanation of how things worked.

Everybody was pleasant.

Everybody was busy.

Within half an hour, her friend was already asking questions.

She was still trying to remember everyone’s names.

Her first assignment was a short news item about a local meeting.

She read the information she’d been given.

Then read it again.

There were dates, names, a decision made by some committee and a statement from somebody whose job title was considerably longer than the statement itself.

She started writing.

After twenty minutes she had three paragraphs.

After another twenty she had two.

She’d decided the first one was terrible and deleted it.

By lunchtime, she’d produced something that contained all the necessary information and absolutely nothing she particularly wanted to read.

Her friend looked over.

“Still working on that?”

“Yes.”

“What’s wrong?”

“Nothing. That’s the problem.”

Her friend laughed.

“It’s a news item.”

“I know.”

“It’s not supposed to be exciting.”

“Well, it’s doing an excellent job.”

They went for lunch.

Her friend had already finished her assignment.

She tried not to think about that.

She was genuinely happy for her. They had studied together, taken exams together, and now here they were, actually working at a newspaper.

But she couldn’t help noticing how differently they approached the work.

Her friend seemed to understand what was expected.

Write the facts. Make it clear. Hand it in.

Our girl kept wanting to add something.

A little background. A human detail. An interesting sentence.

Usually the editor removed it.

Sometimes she watched him do it.

He wasn’t unkind. He just worked quickly, crossing out unnecessary words, changing the order of paragraphs, correcting expressions that didn’t sound quite right.

Her language still needed work.

She knew that.

She’d written an excellent entrance exam about the war in Iraq and had finished her first year among the top three students in her group.

But apparently none of that was particularly useful when someone needed two hundred words about a meeting of the local council.

She could write pages about something that interested her.

Give her a book, a historical event, an argument about politics or literature, and she could keep going long after everybody else had lost interest.

But news items?

They seemed determined to defeat her.

She wanted to write interviews.

Long ones.

She wanted to talk to writers and actors, ask questions about books and theatre, find out what people thought and why.

There was a theatre in town, and sometimes she looked at its posters on her way to work, wondering whether she could suggest interviewing somebody.

She never quite got around to it.

She was a first-year student.

Who was she supposed to interview?

And what would she say?

Hello, I’m a journalist.

That seemed like a rather ambitious introduction.

She wasn’t even sure she had the right to call herself one.

So she wrote her news items.

Some were published.

Some came back covered in corrections.

Her friend’s articles appeared more often.

They celebrated when one was printed.

“Look at you,” she said, holding up the newspaper. “A real journalist.”

“Stop it.”

“I’m serious. You’ll be running this place by Christmas.”

“I’d settle for getting paid properly.”

They laughed.

And when work finished, they left the newsroom and almost immediately forgot about it.

There were far more interesting things to do.

It was a wonderful summer.

That was what she remembered most clearly.

The sea was close, the weather was good, and she was eighteen, which meant she could sleep for four hours, go to work, spend the afternoon swimming and still have enough energy to go dancing in the evening.

She had no idea where that energy came from.

At forty, she would have liked some of it back.

They met friends on the beach, went to the cinema, took trains to nearby towns and occasionally travelled somewhere without making any particular arrangements about how they were going to get home.

Once they ended up sleeping on a beach because they didn’t have money for a hotel.

It seemed perfectly reasonable at the time.

They had the sea, the stars, a few towels and absolutely no appreciation of the benefits of a proper mattress.

By morning they were cold, sandy and hungry.

They were also delighted with themselves.

They found somewhere to buy breakfast, laughed about the night and immediately started discussing where they should go the following weekend.

There were boys, naturally.

Some they liked.

Some they thought they liked.

Some they discussed for weeks despite having exchanged approximately four sentences with them.

She remembered dancing until her feet hurt, swimming after sunset, borrowing clothes, laughing over things that nobody else would have found particularly funny.

They didn’t spend their evenings analysing their work at the newspaper.

Nobody sat on the beach discussing whether a paragraph should have been shorter.

Nobody worried about tomorrow’s assignments.

The newsroom belonged to the daytime.

The rest of the summer belonged to them.

Sometimes she thought she’d never been quite so free.

Or perhaps that was just how she remembered being eighteen.

Near the end of the internship, the editor asked her to come into his office.

She sat opposite him.

There were papers on his desk and a window behind him.

She couldn’t remember much else about the room.

He asked whether she’d enjoyed her time at the newspaper.

She said yes.

She meant it.

Mostly.

Then they talked about her work.

He told her she had some interesting ideas, but her writing needed improvement.

Particularly her language.

She needed to practise, learn how to structure news stories, become more precise.

She was still at the beginning.

He said she wasn’t quite ready yet.

She listened.

Nodded.

Asked a question or two.

He answered.

It was a perfectly ordinary conversation between an editor and a student who had just completed her first year at university.

He told her to keep studying.

She thanked him.

And left.

Outside, the sun was shining.

There were people walking towards the beach.

Somebody passed her carrying an inflatable swimming ring.

She stood outside the building for a moment, thinking about the conversation.

Then her phone rang.

Her friend wanted to know where she was.

They were going swimming.

“I’ll be there in ten minutes.”

She went.

They spent the afternoon at the beach.

That evening they went out.

It was a good day.

But later, lying in bed, she thought about what the editor had said.

Your writing needs improvement.

Of course it did.

She’d finished one year at university.

What had she expected?

Still, she’d hoped he might say something different.

That she had potential.

That she was talented.

That he’d enjoyed something she’d written.

Perhaps he had said some of those things.

She couldn’t quite remember.

She remembered the corrections.

The articles her friend had written.

The way the editor could take a paragraph she’d struggled with for half an hour and make it better in three minutes.

She turned over in bed.

She’d work harder next year.

That was all.

A perfectly sensible plan.

In September she went back to university.

The same building, the same course, many of the same people.

Everyone had stories about their summer.

She had plenty.

The newspaper.

The sea.

The nights out.

Sleeping on the beach.

She told the story about the beach particularly well.

By the time she’d finished, several people were laughing, and the night sounded rather more comfortable than it had actually been.

Her friend was studying too.

They saw each other in lectures, went for coffee and talked about the usual things.

The internship was over.

Life moved on.

At first, nothing much changed.

She attended classes, read books, wrote assignments.

Some lectures were interesting. Others weren’t.

She still loved literature and history. She could spend an entire evening reading about something that had nothing to do with the assignment she was supposed to finish.

But something had shifted.

Not dramatically.

She didn’t wake up one morning and decide she wasn’t meant to be a journalist.

She simply found herself less enthusiastic.

If an assignment was difficult, she put it off.

If she got a disappointing mark, she wasn’t particularly surprised.

Sometimes she wrote something good and felt pleased for a while.

But the feeling didn’t last.

She started wondering whether journalism was really what she wanted.

Perhaps she should have studied literature.

Or history.

Or languages.

There were so many things she found interesting.

Why had she chosen this one?

She could never remember making the decision particularly carefully.

At eighteen, she’d wanted to write.

Journalism had seemed the obvious answer.

Now she wasn’t so sure.

And the longer she wasn’t sure, the harder it became to do the ordinary things that studying required.

Getting up.

Going to lectures.

Reading what she’d been assigned rather than whatever happened to interest her.

Finishing something even after the exciting part was over.

She was good at beginnings.

She loved beginnings.

New books, new plans, new notebooks, new possibilities.

It was the middle she struggled with.

The long part where nothing especially interesting happened and you were simply expected to carry on.

One morning she didn’t go to university.

She was tired.

She had things to do.

She’d go tomorrow.

Tomorrow there was another reason.

Then she missed a few more classes.

She told herself she’d catch up.

She could.

She’d always been a good student when she wanted to be.

But the longer she stayed away, the more awkward the thought of returning became.

There would be assignments she’d missed.

Lectures she hadn’t attended.

Questions.

And she wasn’t entirely sure she wanted to answer them.

Eventually, going back began to feel like a much bigger decision than staying away.

So she stayed away.

There was no final day.

No conversation with a professor.

No dramatic announcement that journalism had lost one of its brightest young talents.

She simply stopped going.

At first, she felt relieved.

That surprised her a little.

She’d expected to feel worse.

Instead, the constant question of whether she should continue had finally gone quiet.

She didn’t have to decide again the next morning.

She could do something else.

She’d find another course.

Perhaps a different university.

There were subjects she’d always been interested in, and now she could think about them properly.

But first, she needed a job.

If she wasn’t studying, she couldn’t very well spend her days doing nothing and expect somebody else to pay for her life.

That seemed obvious.

So she started working.

She was young, and work was work. It wasn’t necessarily interesting, but she earned money, paid for things herself and felt rather pleased about that.

She looked into other courses.

Made plans.

Changed some of them.

There was time.

Plenty of time.

She was barely twenty.

It didn’t occur to her that one day she’d look back and see this as a turning point.

At the time, it was simply what she was doing.

Working.

Thinking.

Living.

Trying to decide what came next.

Years later, people sometimes asked why she’d left university.

“I studied journalism,” she’d say. “Then I did an internship at a newspaper. The editor told me I wasn’t good enough.”

It was easier to explain that way.

People understood.

They’d nod sympathetically, sometimes say something about how cruel editors could be.

She’d smile.

He hadn’t been cruel.

She knew that.

He’d told her to study.

And she had gone back.

For a while.

But getting into all of that took time, and usually the person asking was only making conversation.

So she told the shorter version.

It wasn’t entirely wrong.

It just left out quite a lot.

Occasionally somebody would ask whether she regretted it.

“Sometimes,” she’d say.

And that was true too.

She thought about university now and then.

About the subjects she might have studied.

About the sort of work she might have done.

Sometimes she wondered whether she’d have become a good journalist if she’d stayed.

Probably.

Perhaps.

She’d never know.

But what she missed most wasn’t the newspaper.

Or the assignments.

It was the feeling she’d had before any of it happened.

That everything was still possible.

She remembered the sea.

Her friend.

The little newspaper office.

The ridiculous amount of energy they’d had.

The nights they stayed out until morning because they didn’t want the day to end.

She remembered herself in jeans and a white T-shirt, standing outside the newsroom.

Terrified of walking through the door.

She smiled.

She’d gone in, after all.

That had been something.

And then, many years later, sitting at a desk in an entirely different office, she opened a blank document on her computer.

She had an idea for a story.

Nothing particularly important.

Just something she’d been thinking about.

She wrote a sentence.

Read it.

Changed a word.

Then wrote another.

For a while, she forgot about the emails waiting in her inbox.

And about the workday.

And about the fact that she’d once been told she wasn’t quite ready.

She kept writing.

No alarm. No emails. No reason to get up.

Lovely.

She stayed in bed for another twenty minutes, scrolling through her phone.

Someone had got married. Someone else had got divorced. A woman from school was celebrating her twentieth wedding anniversary.

Twenty years.

She looked at the photographs.

They looked happy.

Good for them.

She wondered when everybody had become old enough to be married for twenty years.

Eventually she got up, made coffee and decided to tidy the apartment.

She started with the books, which was a mistake.

There were books she’d read, books she’d started, books she intended to read, and several she didn’t remember buying.

Inside an old novel she found a photograph.

Five girls outside their school.

She recognised herself immediately.

“Oh, Jesus.”

The hair.

What had she been thinking?

Anna stood beside her, laughing at something outside the frame.

Her phone vibrated.

Seven tonight? Same place? Anna wrote.

Yes. Just found a school photo. We should have been legally prevented from choosing our own hairstyles.

Speak for yourself. I looked fantastic.

You looked like a mushroom.

An elegant mushroom.

She laughed.

She hadn’t seen Anna in four months.

They’d been friends since school, although they weren’t the sort of friends who spoke every day. Sometimes weeks passed without a message. Then they’d meet and talk for hours.

She liked that. No explanations about why nobody had called.

She put the photograph on the shelf and went back to her coffee.

She arrived at the wine bar six minutes late.

Anna was already there.

“You’re late.”

“Only six minutes.”

“Seven.”

“Nice to see you too.”

They hugged.

Anna had cut her hair. Otherwise she looked much the same.

“Wine?” Anna asked.

“Please.”

They ordered and settled into the familiar business of catching up.

Anna told her about a colleague who kept organising team-building activities.

“He wants us to do an escape room.”

“Why?”

“To build trust.”

“Nothing builds trust like discovering which of your colleagues is completely useless under pressure.”

Anna laughed.

“He’s very enthusiastic.”

“That makes it worse.”

They talked about work, families, people they knew, people they used to know.

Anna told her about a neighbour who’d started renovating his flat at seven every Saturday morning.

“I’d kill him,” she said.

“I’ve considered it.”

“Have you spoken to him?”

“No.”

“Probably start there.”

Anna grinned.

Then she put down her glass.

“So. Anyone interesting in your life?”

She thought about Friday.

“Actually, I met someone.”

“Oh?”

“Don’t.”

“I haven’t said anything.”

“You made a noise.”

“Sorry. Continue.”

She told Anna about the pizzeria. The oregano, the chilli oil, the conversation that had somehow lasted most of the evening.

“He kept borrowing things from your table?”

“Yes.”

“Are you sure he wasn’t just hungry?”

“He’d ordered his own food, Anna.”

“People are strange.”

They laughed.

“He was nice,” she said. “We talked about everything. Books, travelling, work.”

“And?”

“And nothing.”

“Did he ask for your number?”

“Yes.”

“And you said no?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know. I just didn’t want to.”

Anna shrugged.

“Fair enough.”

“I liked him, though.”

“Then maybe you’ll bump into him again.”

“Maybe.”

“What was his name?”

She opened her mouth.

And stopped.

Anna stared at her.

“No.”

She started laughing.

“I know. I know.”

“You talked to him for hours!”

“I remember his face.”

“Well, that’s reassuring.”

“And his coffee order.”

“Even better. You can identify him by his cappuccino.”

They laughed so loudly that a woman at the next table looked over.

She lowered her voice.

“Anyway. It was a good evening.”

“Sounds like it.”

Anna took another sip of wine.

And they moved on.

By the second glass, they were talking about school.

It always happened eventually.

“Do you remember Laura’s eighteenth?” Anna asked.

“The one with that horrible pineapple salad?”

“That was my birthday.”

“No, it wasn’t.”

“Yes, it was.”

She thought for a moment.

There had definitely been pineapple.

“And somebody broke a chair,” she said.

“That was Laura’s nineteenth.”

“Are you sure?”

“Pretty sure.”

“God, we had a lot of parties.”

“And terrible food.”

She laughed.

“I’m still convinced the salad was at Laura’s.”

“You can ask her.”

“Absolutely not. Imagine calling someone after twenty years to ask about a salad.”

Anna smiled.

“I’d actually quite like to hear that conversation.”

They ordered another glass.

Somehow the subject changed to a school trip.

She remembered getting lost in an unfamiliar town, trying to ask for directions and ending up near a church.

Anna insisted it had been a post office.

“There was a church.”

“There wasn’t.”

“I remember it.”

“You also remember pineapple at the wrong birthday.”

“Anna, it was twenty years ago. We’re allowed to forget things.”

“Apparently we’re also allowed to build churches.”

She laughed.

“Fine. A post office. But it was a very beautiful post office.”

They moved on to boys they’d liked.

One had become a dentist.

Another had moved to Canada.

A third had married a woman who looked remarkably like their old French teacher.

“Maybe he had a type,” Anna said.

“He was in love with her for two years.”

“See? Consistency.”

They laughed.

Anna showed her an old photograph on her phone.

There she was at eighteen, holding a blue notebook.

“Oh, I loved that notebook.”

“You carried it everywhere.”

“I was going to be a journalist.”

“You were quite serious about it.”

“I know.”

“Remember when you interviewed that politician?”

She looked at the photograph.

“The one who came to town?”

“Yes. You asked him some question he didn’t like.”

She smiled.

“That sounds about right.”

“He told you you’d make a good journalist, didn’t he?”

“I think so.”

“God, you talked about it for weeks.”

“Well, apparently I was very impressed with myself.”

“You were.”

They laughed.

Anna put the phone away.

“Do you ever regret leaving university?”

“Sometimes.”

“Really?”

“Sometimes I wonder what would’ve happened if I’d finished.”

“Would you have liked being a journalist?”

“I think so. The interviews, definitely. I liked talking to people. Still do.”

“You never had trouble with that.”

“I had trouble with everything else.”

“Everyone has trouble with something.”

She shrugged.

“True.”

For a moment they were quiet.

Then Anna remembered a professor they’d both hated, and the conversation went somewhere else.

They stayed much longer than planned.

At some point Anna went to the bathroom, and she sat watching the people around her.

There was a couple by the window who seemed to be arguing without speaking.

She watched them for a while, trying to decide who was winning.

Then she noticed her reflection in the dark glass and moved a strand of hair away from her face.

She needed to dye her roots.

Again.

Anna came back.

“What are you looking at?”

“My hair.”

“What’s wrong with it?”

“It’s growing.”

“How inconsiderate.”

She laughed.

“Do you remember when I dyed it black?”

“Oh, God. Yes.”

“I thought I looked mysterious.”

“You looked angry.”

“I probably was.”

They laughed.

“What was your natural colour?” Anna asked.

She thought about it.

“Dark blonde, I think.”

“Wasn’t it brown?”

“Maybe light brown.”

“Don’t you remember?”

“I started dyeing it at sixteen. How would I remember?”

Anna shrugged.

“Fair point.”

She tried to picture herself before the first bottle of hair dye.

There were photographs somewhere.

But even those seemed to belong to slightly different girls.

“Doesn’t matter,” she said. “I’m not going back to it anyway.”

Anna raised her glass.

“To artificial improvements.”

They drank.

Outside, the air was cold.

Anna wrapped her scarf around her neck.

“We should do this more often.”

“We always say that.”

“One day we might.”

They hugged.

“Love you,” Anna said.

“Love you too.”

Anna went towards her hotel.

She walked home slowly.

She was happy they’d met.

It was good to sit with someone who remembered her before work and bills and all the other things that had somehow become her life.

Anna remembered the same teachers, the same parties, some of the same people.

Not always the same details.

But close enough.

She smiled, thinking about the pineapple salad.

It had definitely been Laura’s birthday.

She was almost certain.

At home she took off her shoes, left her bag on the chair and drank a glass of water.

The apartment was quiet.

She was tired.

Five hours of talking. Laughing. Remembering.

And occasionally trying to remember what she’d told Anna the last time they met.

She sat down on the sofa.

It was nice not having to say anything now.

She stayed there for a few minutes.

Then remembered something Anna had said and started laughing.

“Oh, Anna. You’re so full of shit.”

She considered sending her a message.

Decided against it.

They’d talked enough for one night.

On her way to the bedroom she remembered the man from the pizzeria.

Still couldn’t remember his name.

“Unbelievable,” she muttered.

Then she turned off the light.